Produced by Andrew Hodson WILLIE THE WAIF BY MINIE HERBERT _FULLY ILLUSTRATED_ LONDON S. W. PARTRIDGE & CO. 8 & 9 PATERNOSTER ROW CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME. 7 II. A FRIEND IN NEED III. THE MISSION SCHOOL IV. A VISITOR FOR WILLIE V. THE CHRISTMAS TREAT VI. LITTLE BERTRAM WILLIE THE WAIF ---o--- CHAPTER I RUNNING AWAY FROM HOME One hot summer's day the sun was trying to shine into a poor, miserable alley in London. There are some places in that great city where even the sun cannot find its way, and Primrose Place was one of them. It was a very narrow court, and the houses on both sides were so high that the people who lived there had never seen the sunbeams shining on the pavement or glinting on the windows. But even supposing the sun could have shone into the court, it would not have been able to pierce into the rooms, for the windows were too dirty. Most of them were broken and patched with brown paper. The doors of the houses always stood open, so that people could go in and out without knocking. Very few of them could afford to pay enough rent to have two rooms all to themselves, so that a whole family was generally huddled into one room, in which they had to live during the day and sleep at night. But most of the daytime was spent by the inhabitants of Primrose Place out of doors, lounging about on the pavement, or sitting on the doorsteps. On this day, if you had walked down the court, you would have seen groups of women standing round the doors gossiping, with their sleeves rolled up to their elbows, and nothing on their heads. This was the way they all spent their time when they were not in the beershops, one of which stood, as usual, at each corner of the court. These women never had time to clean their rooms, even if they had known they were dirty. But this fact they did not know. They had never seen them any other way and they had become so used to their surroundings that they never noticed the dirt.