Lucy was just leaving her home one morning to go to her pupil, and had turned into the flagged passage which led from the archway into the court, when she met a little girl of her acquaintance, whom, with her help, I shall now present to my readers. She was a child of eight, but very small for her age. Her hair was neatly parted and brushed on each side of a large, smooth forehead, projecting over quiet eyes of blue, made yet quieter by the shadow of those brows. The rest of her face was very diminutive. A soberness as of complete womanhood, tried and chastened, lay upon her. She looked as if she had pondered upon life and its goal, and had made up her little mind to meet its troubles with patience. She was dressed in a cotton frock printed with blue rose-buds, faded by many waters and much soap. When she spoke, she used only one side of her mouth for the purpose, and then the old-fashionedness of her look rose almost to the antique, so that you could have fancied her one of the time-belated _good people_ that, leaving the green forest-rings, had wandered into the city and become a Christian at a hundred years of age. "Well, Mattie," said Lucy, "how are you this morning?" "I am quite well, I thank you, miss," answered Mattie. "I don't call this morning. The church clock struck eleven five minutes ago." This was uttered with a smile from the half of her mouth which seemed to say, "I know you want to have a little fun with me by using wrong names for things because I am a little girl, and little girls can be taken in; but it is of no use with me, though I can enjoy the joke of it." Lucy smiled too, but not much, for she knew the child. "What do you call the morning, then, Mattie?" she asked. "Well,"--she almost always began her sentences with a _Well_--"I call it morning before the sun is up." "But how do you know when the sun is up? London is so foggy, you know, Mattie." "Is it? I didn't know. Are there places without fog, miss?" "Oh, yes; many." "Well, about the sun. I always know what _he's_ about, miss. I've got a almanac." "But you don't understand the almanac, do you?" "Well, I don't mean to say I understand all about it, but I always know what time the sun rises and goes to bed, you know." Lucy had found she was rather early for the train, and from where she stood she could see the clock of St. Jacob's, which happened to be a reliable one. Therefore she went on to amuse herself with the child. "But how is it that we don't see him, if he gets up when the almanac says, Mattie?" "Well, you see, miss, he sleeps in a crib. And the sides of it are houses and churches, and St. Paulses, and the likes of that." "Yes, yes; but some days we see him, and others we don't. We don't see him to-day, now." "Well, miss, I dare say he's cross some mornings, and keeps the blankets about him after he's got his head up." Lucy could not help thinking of Milton's line--for of the few poems she knew, one was the "Ode on the Nativity"--