One of the memories of her dreary life in Moon Street, which remained most vividly impressed on her mind, was of a very poor family whose head was an old man who mended broken-bottomed cane-chairs for a living; the others being a daughter, a middle-aged woman whose husband had forsaken her, and her three children. The eldest child was a stolid-looking round-faced girl about thirteen years old, who had the care of the little ones while her mother was away at work in a laundry. This family lodged in a house adjoining the one in which Fan lived, and for several weeks after they came there she used to shrink away in fear from the old grandfather whenever she saw him going out in the morning and returning in the evening. He was a tall spare old man, sixty-five or seventy years old, with clothes worn almost to threads, a broad-brimmed old felt hat on his head, and one of his knees stiff, so that he walked like a man with a wooden leg. But he was erect as a soldier, and always walked swiftly, even when returning, tired no doubt, from a long day's wandering and burdened with his bundle of cane and three or four old broken chairs--his day's harvest. But what a face was that old man's! He had long hair, almost white, a thin grey stern face with sharp aquiline features, and, set deep under his feather-like tufty eyebrows, blue eyes that looked cold and keen as steel. If he had walked in Pall Mall, dressed like a gentleman, the passer-by would have turned to look after him, and probably said, “There goes a leader of men--a man of action--a fighter of England's battles in some distant quarter of the globe.” But he was only an old gatherer of broken chairs, and got sixpence for each chair he mended, and lived on it; an indomitable old man who lived bravely and would die bravely, albeit not on any burning plain or in any wild mountain pass, leading his men, but in a garret, where he would mend his last broken chair, and look up unflinching in the Destroyer's face. Whenever he came stumping rapidly past, and turned that swift piercing eagle glance on Fan, she would shrink aside as if she felt the sting of sleet or a gust of icy-cold wind on her face. That was at first. Afterwards she discovered that at a certain hour of the late afternoon the eldest girl would come down and take up her station in the doorway to wait his coming. When he appeared her eyes would sparkle and her whole face kindle with a glad excitement, and hiding herself in the doorway, she would wait his arrival, then suddenly spring out to startle him with a joyous cry. The sight of this daily meeting had such a fascination for Fan that she would always try to be there at the proper time to witness it; and after it was over she would go about for hours feeling a kind of reflected happiness in her heart at the love which gladdened these poor people's lives.