been but a week away? Nello did what he was told to do at school: but he was very slow about it, being so little, and so unused to work--for which he was punished; and he could not learn his lessons for brooding over his troubles, and wondering when _they_ would come, or what they could mean; and naturally he was punished for that too. The big boys hustled him about; they played him a hundred tricks: they laughed at his timid, baby-washings, his carefulness, the good order to which he had been trained. To toss everything about, to do everything loudly, and noisily, and carelessly, was the religion of Mr. Swan’s boys, as everything that was the reverse of this had been the religion in which Nello was trained. Poor little boy, his life was as full of care as if he had been fifty. He was sent here and there on a hundred errands; he had impositions which he could not write, and lessons which he could not learn; and not least, perhaps, meals which he could not eat; and out-of-door tasks quite unsuitable for him, and which he could not perform. He was for ever toiling after something he ought to have done. He grew dirty, neglected, unkempt, miserable. He could not clean his own boots, which was one thing required of him; but plastered him self all over with mysterious blacking, in a vain attempt to fulfil this task, he who had scarcely dressed himself till now, scarcely brushed his own hair. He kept up a struggle against all these labours, which were more cruel than those of Hercules, as long as he had the hope within him that somebody must come to deliver him; for, with a childish jump at what he wished, he had believed that some one might come “to-morrow,” when he sent, or thought he sent, his letter away. The to-morrow pushed itself on and on, hope getting fainter, and misery stronger, yet still seemed to gleam upon him, a possibility still. “Oh, pray God send Mary,” he said, every night and morning. When a week was over, he added a more urgent cry, “Oh, pray God send _some one_, only some one! Oh, pray God take me home!” the child cried. He repeated it one night aloud, in the exhaustion of his disappointment, with an irrepressible moaning and crying: “Oh, pray God take me home!” He was very tired, poor little boy; he was half wrapped in his little bit of curtain, to hide him as he said his prayers, and he had fallen half asleep while he said them, and was struggling with drowsiness, and duty, and a hope which though now falling more and more into despondency, still gave pertinacity to his prayer. He was anxious, very anxious to press this petition on God’s notice. Repetition; is not that the simplest primitive necessity of earnest supplication? Perhaps God might not take any notice the first time, but He might the next. “Oh, take me home. Oh, pray God take me home!” God too, like Mary and the rest, seemed to pay no attention; but God did not require written letters or directions in a legible hand: He could be approached more easily.