The man who had taken her in his arms was a small tradesman, dealing in coals and potatoes, and a little--a very little--greengrocery. He lived in a neighbouring street, in a small house, and was blessed with a wife and nine children, who were “dragged” up somehow. He was one of the first on the spot when the alarm of fire was given. He saw Lotte landed from the fire-escape; he observed the agonized expression upon the poor girl’s face--heard her low, hysteric sobbing, and saw her totter as though she would fall upon her face in the muddy, eddying pool in which, barefooted, she was standing. It was enough for him. He drew off instantly his heavy coat of “fashionable cable cord,” and, flinging it over her shoulders, caught her up in his arms, and raced off to his old ’oman with his burden, followed by a small train of women and boys. His wife was no little astonished at this sudden accession to her household; but her womanly sympathy was roused immediately she beheld the condition of the poor girl, and learned that she had been rescued from the raging fire, which her husband had so short a time previously run off to see, and she at once busied herself by applying those restoratives, known to most women, which, though simple, are efficacious in restoring to consciousness those of the sex who fall into swoons. Lotte Clinton, being a girl of strong feelings, was not, however, easily brought to a calm sense of her great affliction; on the contrary, she recovered from one fainting fit only to fall into another, worse than its predecessor; and when, by the aid of the parish doctor, who had been called in, she was relieved from successive swoons and thrown into a sleep, it was only to awake in a paroxysm of fever and delirium. Two days she lay thus: on the third, late at night, when the hard-worked parish doctor made his appearance, in order that he might see his patient the last thing, he stood with the woman of the house, at the bed-side of the poor girl. Two or three anxious questions were put to him, but he shook his head, as the woman thought, ominously. “She is rapidly approaching a crisis,” he said. “By the dawn her fate will be decided. She has in her favour youth and a good constitution; but it is impossible to tell what may result from the ravages of so fierce a fever as that under which she is suffering. We must hope for the best, and leave the rest in the hands of God! I think it would be proper to make her friends acquainted with her condition, and the sooner they are here at her bed-side the better will be their chance of taking their last farewell of her.” Those were dread words: ill-omened shadows did they cast. The woman raised her apron to her eyes, and gulped audibly, once or twice.