A little thing came feeling the way into the narrow, dingy shop, one dark November evening, groping along by the sacks of potatoes (all of them “seconds,” for the firm did not deal much in “Ware Regents”), feeling its way along the sacks which towered above its head, like bulky snow–giants embrowned with thaw; and then by the legs of the “tatie–bin,” with the great scales hanging above it, and then by the heap of lighting–wood, piled in halfpenny bundles, with the ends against the wall; and so the little thing emerged between two mighty hills of coleworts, and under the frugal gas–burner, and congratulated itself, with a hug of the heart, upon safety. “Take care, my dear,” cried Mrs. Ducksacre, looking large behind the counter, “or youʼll tumble down the coal–trap, where the black bogeys lives. Bless my heart, if it ainʼt little Loo! Why, Loo, I hardly knew you. You ainʼt looking like yourself a bit, child. And who sent you out at this time of night? What a shame, to be sure!” Loo, the pride of Issachar Jupp, was rather a pretty little body, about three and a half years old, “going on for four,” as she loved to say, if anybody asked her; and her pale but clean face would have been _very_ pretty, if her mother would have let her hair alone. But it was all combed back, and tied tightly behind, like the tail of a horse at a fair, or as affording a spout to pour the little girl out by. She looked up at Mrs. Ducksacre, while her fingers played with the coleworts, for her hands were hot, and this cooled them; and then, with the instinct of nature, she stuck up for her father and mother. “Pease, maʼam, Loo not fray much,”—though her trembling frock belied her, all over the throat and the heart of it—“and father don from home, maʼam, on the Wasintote” [Basingstoke canal], “and mother dot nobody, onʼy Loo, to do thins. And she send this, ‘cause Looʼs poor troat be bad, maʼam.” The little child, whose throat was tied up with worn flannel from the char–bucket, with the grey edge still upon it, wriggled in and out of her shape and self, in the way only children can do; and at length drew, from some innermost shrine, a halfpenny and a farthing. “And what am I to give you for it, Loo? Oh, you poor little thing, how very hoarse you are!” Loo, with a confidence in human nature purely non–Londinian, had placed her cash upon the altar, upon the inside of which so many worship, while on the outside so many are sacrificed; without circumlocution, the counter. Her eyes were below the rim of it, till she stood upon tiptoe with one foot, while the other was up in the colewort roots, and then she could see the money, and she poked out her little lips at it, as if she would fain suck it back again. “Pease, maʼam, Looʼs troat so bad, mother are goin to make a ‘tew, tree haʼporth of tipe and a haʼporth of ‘egents, and a fardy of inons!”