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!”