The child had gathered up his blacking-brush and bit of rag, and had put them into the old tin saucepan; and was now working his way, as well as his clothes would let him, with his make-believe pail hugged up in his arms, towards a door of communication which led from the back to the front garret.

“I say,” says he, looking round sharply over his shoulder, “what are you two stopping here for?  I’m going to bed now—­and so I tell you!”

With that, he opened the door, and walked into the front room.  Seeing Trottle take a step or two to follow him, Benjamin’s mother opened her wicked old eyes in a state of great astonishment.

“Mercy on us!” says she, “haven’t you seen enough of him yet?”

“No,” says Trottle.  “I should like to see him go to bed.”

Benjamin’s mother burst into such a fit of chuckling that the loose extinguisher in the candlestick clattered again with the shaking of her hand.  To think of good Mr. Forley’s friend taking ten times more trouble about the imp than good Mr. Forley himself!  Such a joke as that, Benjamin’s mother had not often met with in the course of her life, and she begged to be excused if she took the liberty of having a laugh at it.

Leaving her to laugh as much as she pleased, and coming to a pretty positive conclusion, after what he had just heard, that Mr. Forley’s interest in the child was not of the fondest possible kind, Trottle walked into the front room, and Benjamin’s mother, enjoying herself immensely, followed with the candle.

There were two pieces of furniture in the front garret.  One, an old stool of the sort that is used to stand a cask of beer on; and the other a great big ricketty straddling old truckle bedstead.  In the middle of this bedstead, surrounded by a dim brown waste of sacking, was a kind of little island of poor bedding—­an old bolster, with nearly all the feathers out of it, doubled in three for a pillow; a mere shred of patchwork counter-pane, and a blanket; and under that, and peeping out a little on either side beyond the loose clothes, two faded chair cushions of horsehair, laid along together for a sort of makeshift mattress.  When Trottle got into the room, the lonely little boy had scrambled up on the bedstead with the help of the beer-stool, and was kneeling on the outer rim of sacking with the shred of counterpane in his hands, just making ready to tuck it in for himself under the chair cushions.

“I’ll tuck you up, my man,” says Trottle.  “Jump into bed, and let me try.”

“I mean to tuck myself up,” says the poor forlorn child, “and I don’t mean to jump.  I mean to crawl, I do—­and so I tell you!”