'No, it was you that was a-dyin', Tom!' exclaimed Blade-o'-Grass, clapping her hands. 'A-dyin' by inches, you know!' Gratified vanity gleamed in Tom Beadle's eyes, and when Blade-o'-Grass added, 'But, O Tom, how you frightened me at first!' his triumph was complete, and he enjoyed an artist's sweetest pleasure. Then he gloated over the imposition he had practised upon the benevolent stranger, and cried in glee, 'Wasn't he green, Bladergrass? _He_ thought I was dyin' by inches, as well as you. O, O, O!' and laughed and danced, to the admiration of Blade-o'-Grass, without feeling a particle of gratitude for the benevolent instinct which had saved his companion from starvation. [Illustration] After this fashion did Blade-o'-Grass learn life's lessons, and learn to fight its battles. Deprived of wholesome teaching and wholesome example; believing, from very necessity, that bad was good; without any knowledge of God and His infinite goodness, she, almost a baby-child, went out into the world, in obedience to the law of nature, in search of food. A slice of bread-and-butter was more to her than all the virtues, the exercise of which, as we are taught, bestows the light of eternal happiness. And yet, if earnest men are to be believed, and if there be truth in newspaper columns, the vast machinery around her was quick with sympathy for her, as one of a class whom it is man's duty to lift from the dust. Such struggles for the amelioration (fine word!) of the human race were being made by earnest natures, that it was among the most awful mysteries of the time, how Blade-o'-Grass was allowed to grow up in the ignorance which deprives crime of responsibility; how she was forced to be dead to the knowledge of virtue; how she was compelled to earn the condemnation of men, and to make sorrowful the heart of the Supreme! MR. MERRYWHISTLE RELIEVES HIMSELF ON THE SUBJECT OF INDISCRIMINATE CHARITY. The name of the man who gave Tom Beadle the shilling was Merrywhistle. He was a bachelor, and he lived in the eastern part of the City, in Buttercup-square, next door to his best friends, the Silvers. Although Buttercup-square was in the east of the City, where the greatest poverty is to be found, and where people crowd upon each other unhealthfully, it was as pretty and comfortable a square as could be found anywhere; and you might live in any house in it and fancy yourself in the country, when you looked out of window. The trees in the square were full of birds' nests, and the singing of the birds of a summer morning was very sweet to the ear.