So it came to pass that Mary took charge of the “weakly but very pretty babe”--as she recalled him, long years after, when he lay dead at Edmonton, and she, in the next room, was rambling disjointedly on about all their past. With a childish wisdom, born, surely, not of her years, but rather of her loneliness and her unrequited caresses and her craving for companionship, she became at once his big sister, his little mother, his guardian angel. She cared for him in his helpless babyhood, she gave strength to his feeble frame, she nurtured his growing brain, she taught him to talk and to walk. We seem to see the tripping of his feet, that “---- half linger, Half run before,” trying to keep pace with her steps then; even as they always all through life tried to do, wheresoever she walked, until they stopped at the edge of his grave. The story of these two lives of double singleness, from these childish footprints to that grave, is simply the story of their love. He, like his own Child-Angel, was to know weakness and reliance and the shadow of human imbecility; and he was to go with a lame gait; _but, in his goings, he “exceeded all mortal children in grace and swiftness_.” And so pity springs up in us, as in angelic bosoms; and yearnings touch us, too, at the memory of this “immortal lame one.” The boy’s next school, to which he obtained a presentation through the influence of Mr. Salt, is known officially as Christ’s Hospital, and is commonly called the Blue-Coat School. It still stands, a stately monument of the munificence of “that godly and royal child, King Edward VI., the flower of the Tudor name--the young flower that was untimely cropped, as it began to fill our land with its early odours--the boy-patron of boys--the serious and holy child, who walked with Cranmer and Ridley.” To-day, as we stay our steps in Newgate Street, and peer through the iron railings at the dingy red brick and stone facings of the ancient walls; or, as we pause under the tiny statue of the boy-king--founder, only ten days before his death, of this noble hospital for poor fatherless children and foundlings--we may look at the out-of-school games going on in the great quadrangle: the foolish flapping skirts of the striplings tucked into their red leathern waistbands to give fair and free play to their lanky yellow legs, their uncapped heads taking sun or shower with equal unconcern.