"If I am bad, Jem," burst out the girl, raging with passion, and her eyes filled with tears, "who made me so? Who kept chiming into my ears that I had a pretty face and that I ought to sell it? Who, I say? Who was it," continued the girl, clenching her hands, and her face blazing with excitement, "that struck me last Christmas night, come two years, and pitched me out of the hole that we lived in on Saffron Hill? And then I had to seek a livin' in the streets, and when I was hungry I took money and sold myself to perdition; and then I had a father who used to steal it from me when I'd come home to sleep, and he'd take the few shillings that I earned by my shame, to go and drink it, and none of ye were ashamed to live on the money that lost my poor soul. Not one of ye." Here the girl, utterly exhausted, sat down on the stones and wept as if her heart was going to break, while the ragged child, who had by this time succeeded in burning her fingers a number of times, looked on in wonder at the sudden turmoil of vagabondism. The son, a powerfully built fellow, looked up and said: "Molly, I wish your devilish trap ud shut. Wot good does this do any of ye, I'd like to know. Here I've been hon the aggrawatin' tramp for two weeks, and I hexpected to see yes all comfortable like, when I kum home, in Saffron Hill, down St. Giles way, and here I finds yes hall a-living hunder London Bridge by night, and a-beggin, or doin' wuss, in the day time. Hits enuff to make a saint swear at his blessed liver." "Wuss luck, Jem; wuss luck, Jem; I halways knew as how it would come to this, a-sooner or a-later," said an old crone in the corner of the archway, who was smoking a pipe and whom I believed to be fast asleep. "Well, sir, if ye'v got no hobjection," said the stout young man, "I'll tell you our story. It isn't much of a story to tell, after all. The old man there went to be a navvy and got two shillings a day until he took to drink; when he had work on the Great Western. They used to swindle him in the Tommy shops. Them's the shops, you see, where a contractor who 'as the job to bulk it, keeps the groceries and grub for the navvies. They skin the navvies so terribly, do these Tommy shops, and when his week is up, a man has nothing left out of his vages, cos', you see, they halways manages to run up the bill as high as the week's vages. Oh! they are precious scoundrels!" "Don't call them scoundrels, Jem. Hit's too good a name for them haltogether," said the old man, who was beginning to doze. "Will you shut up?" savagely said the hopeful son; and then he continued, when he had taken a whiff at the pipe: "Well, by and by the old man got to drinking so much beer that the whole of the wages was drawn for lush, and he had nothing to eat during the week excepting what the other men gave him for charity." "Hevery word of that's a lie, Jem. Wot a precious talent you have, to be sure, for habusin of your poor old fayther."