After calling passionately on Stevie, touching his face, which was colder than stone, I slipped my hands over him down the sides of the box, nearly toppling in myself in the energy of labour. I see myself now, with pursed lips and frowning brows, panting in the extremity of haste. At last my hands met under the poor narrow shoulders, and I proceeded to drag the body out of the box. I had nearly accomplished the feat, and Stevie's head and one arm hung over the side, when the door opened and my stepfather stood upon the threshold, dazed with horror, I can now believe. His look so terrified me that I clambered down from the chair, with an inclination to cry. "What have they done to Stevie?" I gasped, as I saw him gently lift back the dark head and desecrated limb. My stepfather's eyes brimmed over, and he took me into his arms, murmuring vague words about heaven and angels, with his wet cheek pressed upon mine. This was how I learnt that Stevie was dead. Chapter IV. THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS. After the vivid impression of Stevie's death, the days are a blank. Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind. A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby's, for mouth a comical slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig's. His hair was white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin. He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me entertainment for several months--the repetition of nursery rhymes. He possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as well was inexhaustible. We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember the end of one that began-- "There was an old man who supposed The street door was partially closed." For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him, grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door. I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot tell what it was. Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had become quite a wonderful old man. Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:--