would have fallen sidelong from the coach, if his neighbour had not griped him hard with a hand that could have kept a young oak from falling. “Rouse yourself!--you might have had an ugly tumble.” Philip muttered something inaudible, between sleeping and waking, and turned his dark eyes towards the man; in that glance there was so much unconscious, but sad and deep reproach, that the passenger felt touched and ashamed. Before however, he could say anything in apology or conciliation, Philip had again fallen asleep. But this time, as if he had felt and resented the rebuff he had received, he inclined his head away from his neighbour, against the edge of a box on the roof--a dangerous pillow, from which any sudden jolt might transfer him to the road below. “Poor lad!--he looks pale!” muttered the man, and he knocked the weed from his pipe, which he placed gently in his pocket. “Perhaps the smoke was too much for him--he seems ill and thin,” and he took the boy’s long lean fingers in his own. “His cheek is hollow!--what do I know but it may be with fasting? Pooh! I was a brute. Hush, coachee, hush! don’t talk so loud, and be d---d to you--he will certainly be off!” and the man softly and creepingly encircled the boy’s waist with his huge arm. “Now, then, to shift his head; so-so,--that’s right.” Philip’s sallow cheek and long hair were now tenderly lapped on the soliloquist’s bosom. “Poor wretch! he smiles; perhaps he is thinking of home, and the butterflies he ran after when he was an urchin--they never come back, those days;--never--never--never! I think the wind veers to the east; he may catch cold;”--and with that, the man, sliding the head for a moment, and with the tenderness of a woman, from his breast to his shoulder, unbuttoned his coat (as he replaced the weight, no longer unwelcomed, in its former part), and drew the lappets closely round the slender frame of the sleeper, exposing his own sturdy breast--for he wore no waistcoat--to the sharpening air. Thus cradled on that stranger’s bosom, wrapped from the present and dreaming perhaps--while a heart scorched by fierce and terrible struggles with life and sin made his pillow--of a fair and unsullied future, slept the fatherless and friendless boy. CHAPTER VII. “Constance. My life, my joy, my food, my all the world, My widow-comfort.”--King John. Amidst the glare of lamps--the rattle of carriages--the lumbering of carts and waggons--the throng, the clamour, the reeking life and dissonant roar of London, Philip woke from his happy sleep. He woke uncertain and confused, and saw strange eyes bent on him kindly and watchfully. “You have slept well, my lad!” said the passenger, in the deep ringing voice which made itself heard above all the noises around. “And you have suffered me to incommode you thus!” said Philip, with more gratitude in his voice and look than, perhaps, he had shown to any one out of his own family since his birth.