He looked on his child as a nuisance--an expensive interloper in his house that the law obliged him to clothe and feed. He did feed her--badly, and clothed her somewhat better, for the sake of appearances, having a regard for his respectability. He was cruel as well as mean. When he went down to the city he would lock up his infant child, keeping her a pallid prisoner within doors, all through the long summer day. But meanness as well as cruelty prompted this treatment. He would not go to the expense of engaging a nurse for his daughter, and the little maid-of-all-work, as she said herself, had "quite enough to do without lugging that child out for an airing." Again it would not at all do for the child of respectable Mr. Grimm to be seen by the neighbours playing about the streets by herself like any little street arab--the street arabs whom she so soon learned to envy; for though starved, cold, beaten by drunken parents, they were free, free to romp about the gutters with other children, having luckily parents who had no respectability to keep up. I do not know how Mary learned to read and write: in after years she could not say herself; but, at any rate, before she was seven, her father found that he could make his daughter useful. Her small hands, far whiter and thinner, alas! than they should have been, were employed all day in copying deeds and legal documents for him, in the round hand of a solicitor's clerk. In the bright summer afternoons, while other children played, her little brown head was bowed over the dismal folios of chicanery. When Mary was about ten years old a stepmother was introduced into the establishment. Why Grimm married her, what pecuniary or other inducement was present on this occasion, I do not know. But now it came to pass that he--the mean, cowardly, foxy, little man with the red hair and the shifty eyes--met his match. The second Mrs. Grimm was a big woman with a purple face, a loud voice, and an almost Papuan mop of faded-straw coloured hair, a woman who ever overawed the solicitor. In this couple the offensive qualities of the two sexes were reversed. She was the more masculine of the two. The little man's readiest weapon was the feminine needle of nagging; hers the male bludgeon of blustering brutality. Mrs. Grimm number two, without delay, conceived a violent dislike for her husband's little girl. It was on this second marriage that the highly respectable family moved to No. 22 in the genteel street in Brixton. And now the child's position was a more unhappy one than ever; and her inner life became one of hate, a terrible hate--and children can hate even more bitterly than their elders--against her father and step-mother, a hate ever aggravated by the abominable treatment she received at the hands of both.