"For the sixpence, to be sure! Every Saturday night, with a long story of how honest she has been all the week. Here we shall see a girl, who, by her own statement, and with a struggle, can keep honest now--note the effect of indiscriminate alms-giving." "Of rewarding a girl for stealing my brooch, pa." "Ah!--exactly. Some people who didn't understand me, would set me down for a weak-minded old fool. In studying human nature, one must act oddly with odd specimens. And this girl--who came to tell us she had not brought the brooch back--I am just a little--curious--concerning!" CHAPTER V. SET UP IN BUSINESS. I am afraid that the reader will be very much disgusted with us as story-tellers, when we inform him that all these details are but preliminary to our story proper--a kind of prologue in six chapters to the comedy, melodrama or tragedy--which?--that the curtain will rise upon in our next book. Still they are details, without which our characters, and their true positions on our stage, would not have been clearly defined; and in the uphill struggles of our stray, perhaps some student of human nature, like Mr. Hinchford, may take some little interest. For they were real uphill struggles to better herself, and, therefore, worthy of notice. Remarking them, and knowing their genuineness, it has struck us that even from these crude materials a kind of heroine might be fashioned--not the heroine of a high-class book--that is, a "book for the Boudoir"--but of a book that will at least attempt to draw a certain phase of life as plainly as it passed the writer's eyes once. Let us, ere we _begin_ our story, then, speak of this Mattie a little more--this girl, who was not a "reg'lar"--who had never been brought up to "the profession"--who was merely a Stray! Let us even watch her in her new vocation--set up in life with Mr. Hinchford's sixpence--and note by what strange accident it changed the tenor of _her_ life; and at least set her above the angry dash of those waves which, day after day, engulph so many.