“As it is, with three hundred pounds per annum, and enough laid by to keep him, if I fail, an old bachelor has no reason to grumble.  But the sight of that little chap’s nosegay, and the thought of the mother who tied it there, made my heart swell as I fancy the earth must swell when rain is coming.  His eyes filled once, and he brushed them under the pretence of pulling his cap forward, and stole a glance round to see if any one had noticed him.  The other passengers were busy with their own thoughts, and I pretended to stare out of the window opposite; but there was the drop, sure enough, on his hand as he laid it on his lap again.

“He was bound for the docks, and thence for the open sea, and I, that was bound for Tweedy’s only, had to get out at the top of Cheapside.  I know the ’bus conductor,—­a very honest man,—­and, in getting out, I slipped half a crown into his hand to give to the boy, with my blessing, at his journey’s end.  When I picture his face, sir, I wish I had made it five shillings, and gone without a new tie and dinner altogether.”

THE HIRED BABY, By Marie Corelli

A dark, desolate December night, a night that clung to the metropolis like a wet black shroud, a night in which the heavy, low-hanging vapours melted every now and then into a slow, reluctant rain, cold as icicle-drops in a rock cavern.  People passed and repassed in the streets like ghosts in a bad dream; the twinkling gas-light showed them at one moment rising out of the fog, and then disappearing from view as though suddenly engulfed in a vaporous ebon sea.  With muffled, angry shrieks, the metropolitan trains deposited their shoals of shivering, coughing travelers at the several stations, where sleepy officials, rendered vicious by the weather, snatched the tickets from their hands with offensive haste and roughness.  Omnibus conductors grew ill-tempered and abusive without any seemingly adequate reason; shopkeepers became flippant, disobliging, and careless of custom; cabmen shouted derisive or denunciatory language after their rapidly retreating fares; in short, everybody was in a discontented, almost spiteful humour, with the exception of those few aggressively cheerful persons who are in the habit of always making the best of everything, even bad weather.  Down the long wide vista of the Cromwell Road, Kensington, the fog had it all its own way; it swept on steadily, like thick smoke from a huge fire, choking the throats and blinding the eyes of foot-passengers, stealing through the crannies of the houses, and chilling the blood of even those luxurious individuals who, seated in elegant drawing-rooms before blazing fires, easily forgot that there were such bitter things as cold and poverty in that outside world against which they had barred their windows.  At one house in particular—­a house with gaudy glass doors and somewhat spoiled yellow silk curtains at the windows, a house that