He reached the yard, and it vanished in a moment. Little Oliver Twist lay on his back on the pavement, with his shirt unbuttoned and his temples bathed with water; his face a deadly white, and a cold tremble convulsing his whole frame. “Poor boy, poor boy!” said Mr. Brownlow, bending over him. “Call a coach, somebody, pray,—directly!” A coach was obtained, and Oliver, having been carefully laid on one seat, the old gentleman got in and sat himself on the other. “May I accompany you?” said the book-stall keeper, looking in. “Bless me, yes, my dear friend,” said Mr. Brownlow quickly. “I forgot you. Dear, dear! I have this unhappy book still. Jump in. Poor fellow! there’s no time to lose.” The book-stall keeper got into the coach, and away they drove. CHAPTER XII. IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS BEFORE. WITH SOME PARTICULARS CONCERNING A CERTAIN PICTURE. THE coach rattled away down Mount Pleasant and up Exmouth-street,—over nearly the same ground as that which Oliver had traversed when he first entered London in company with the Dodger,—and, turning a different way when it reached the Angel at Islington, stopped at length before a neat house in a quiet shady street near Pentonville. Here a bed was prepared without loss of time, in which Mr. Brownlow saw his young charge carefully and comfortably deposited; and here he was tended with a kindness and solicitude which knew no bounds. But for many days Oliver remained insensible to all the goodness of his new friends; the sun rose and sunk, and rose and sunk again, and many times after that, and still the boy lay stretched upon his uneasy bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever,—that heat which, like the subtle acid that gnaws into the very heart of hardest iron, burns only to corrode and to destroy. The worm does not his work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame. Weak, and thin, and pallid, he awoke at last from what seemed to have been a long and troubled dream. Feebly raising himself in the bed, with his head resting on his trembling arm, he looked anxiously round. “What room is this?—where have I been brought to?” said Oliver. “This is not the place I went to sleep in.” He uttered these words in a feeble voice, being very faint and weak; but they were overheard at once, for the curtain at the bed’s head was hastily drawn back, and a motherly old lady, very neatly and precisely dressed, rose as she undrew it, from an arm-chair close by, in which she had been sitting at needle-work.