She ran home in terrible grief. She tried to sleep, but could not. At
last she could bear it no longer. She went to the old man's room and
wakened him.
"I have had a dreadful dream," she told him, "a dream of an old
gray-haired man like you robbing people of their gold. I can not stay! I
can not leave you here. We must go."
To the crazy old man she seemed an angel. He dressed himself in fear,
and with her little basket on her arm she led him out of the house, on,
away from the town, into the country, far away from Mrs. Jarley, who had
been so kind to them, and from the new home they had found.
They climbed a high hill just as the sun was rising, and far behind them
little Nell caught a last view of the village. As she looked back and
thought how contented they had been there at first, and of the further
wandering that lay before them now, poor little Nell burst into tears.
But at length she bravely dried her tears lest they sadden her
grandfather, and they went on. When the sun grew warm they fell asleep
on the bank of the canal, and when they awoke in the afternoon some
rough canal men took them aboard their dirty craft as far as the next
town.
The men were well-meaning enough and meant the travelers no harm, but
after a while they began to drink and quarreled and fought among
themselves, and little Nell sat all night, wet with the rain, and sang
to them to quiet them.
The place to which they finally came was a town of wretched workmen who
toiled all day in iron furnaces for little wages, and were almost as
miserable and hungry as the wanderers themselves. No one gave them
anything, and they lived for three days with only two penny loaves to
eat (for all their money was now gone), and slept at night in the ashes
of some poor laborer's hut.
The fourth day they dragged themselves into the country again. Little
Nell's shoes were worn through to the bare ground, her feet were
bleeding, her limbs ached and she was deadly faint. They begged, but no
one would help them.
The child's strength was almost gone, when they met a traveler who was
reading in a book as he walked along. He looked up as they came near. It
was the kind old schoolmaster in whose school they had slept before they
met Mrs. Jarley in her house on wheels. When she saw him little Nell
shrieked and fell unconscious at his feet.
The schoolmaster carried her to an inn near by, where she was put to bed
and doctored under his care, for she was very weak. She told him all the
story of their wanderings, and he heard it with astonishment and wonder
to find such a great heart and heroism in a child.
He had been appointed schoolmaster, he told her, in another town, to
which he was then on his way, and he declared they should go with him
and he would care for them. He hired a farm wagon to carry little Nell,
and he and the old man walked beside it, and so they came to their new
place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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