“I can’t,” said Tom, and he laid his head on his knees, and then asked: 

“Is it Sunday?”

“No, then; why should it be?”

“Because I hear the church bells ringing so.”

“Bless thy pretty heart!  The bairn’s sick.  Come wi’ me, and I’ll hap thee up somewhere.  If thou wert a bit cleaner, I’d put thee in my own bed, for the Lord’s sake.  But come along here.”

But when Tom tried to get up, he was so tired and giddy that she had to help him and lead him.

She put him in an outhouse, upon soft, sweet hay and an old rug, and bade him sleep off his walk, and she would come to him when school was over, in an hour’s time.

And so she went in again, expecting Tom to fall fast asleep at once.

But Tom did not fall asleep.

Instead of it he turned and tossed and kicked about in the strangest way, and felt so hot all over that he longed to get into the river and cool himself; and then he fell half asleep, and dreamt that he heard the little white lady crying to him, “Oh, you’re so dirty; go and be washed”; and then that he heard the Irishwoman saying, “Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be.”  And then he heard the church bells ring so loud, close to him too, that he was sure it must be Sunday, in spite of what the old dame had said; and he would go to church, and see what a church was like inside, for he had never been in one, poor little fellow, in all his life.  But the people would never let him come in, all over soot and dirt like that.  He must go to the river and wash first.  And he said out loud again and again, though being half asleep he did not know it, “I must be clean, I must be clean.”

[Illustration.]

And all of a sudden he found himself, not in the outhouse on the hay, but in the middle of a meadow, over the road, with the stream just before him, saying continually, “I must be clean, I mast be clean.”  He had got there on his own legs, between sleep and awake, as children will often get out of bed, and go about the room, when they are not quite well.  But he was not a bit surprised, and went on to the bank of the brook, and lay down on the grass, and looked into the clear, clear, limestone water, with every pebble at the bottom bright and clean, while the little silver trout dashed about in fright at the sight of his black face; and he dipped his feet in and found it so cool, cool, cool; and he said, “I will be a fish; I will swim in the water; I must be clean, I must be clean.”

So he pulled off all his clothes in such haste that he tore some of them, which was easy enough with such ragged old things.  And he put his poor, hot, sore feet into the water; and then his legs; and the farther he went in, the more the church bells rang in his head.

“Ah,” said Tom, “I must be quick and wash myself; the bells are ringing quite loud now; and they will stop soon, and then the door will shut, and I shall never be able to get in at all.”