Saved by Love: A Story of London Streets

THERE are some places in London where King Dirt holds a carnival all the year round—narrow back streets, where the tall houses, almost meeting at the top, shut out every gleam of sunlight, except during the longest and hottest days of summer; and then only a narrow rift of golden glory lights up a strip in the centre, and makes the shady corners look more dark and desolate than ever.

In one of the shadowed nooks of such a street sat a little girl, her head leaning against the brick wall for a pillow; and you might have thought her fast asleep, but for an occasional sob. She had cried so long that her eyes were swollen and heavy; and even the faint light of Fisher's Lane made them ache so much that she was glad to close them.

No one noticed her for some time, but at length a girl about her own age stopped and looked at her, and at last spoke.

"What's the matter?" she said, touching her shoulder.

With a sob and a start the girl opened her eyes.

"O Elfie, is it you?" she said; and then her tears broke out afresh.

"What is it? Haven't you got anything to eat?" she asked.

"I shall never want to eat anything again," sobbed the other. "O Elfie, mother's dead!"

"Dead, is she?" said Elfie, but looking as though she could not understand why that should cause any one to cry.

"I shall never be happy again, Elfie. O mother, mother, why didn't you take me with you?" wailed the poor little orphan.

"Just because she didn't want you, I guess," said Elfie, but at the same time sitting down to soothe the grief she could not understand. "There, don't cry," she went on in a matter-of-fact tone. "My mother's gone away, but I don't cry after her; not a bit of it; I know better than that, Susie Sanders."

Susie shrank from her companion's touch as she said this, and thought of what her mother had said about making companions of the children in the street, and half regretted having spoken to Elfie. There was a great difference in the two girls, any one could see, though both might be equally poor. Elfie was unmistakably a street child, ragged, dirty, sharp-looking, with bright cunning eyes shining out of a good-tempered-looking face; while Susie, in her patched black frock and tidy pinafore, and timid, shrinking ways, showed unmistakably that, poor as she might be, there had been some one to love and take care of her. Alas for her, poor child! Her only friend in the wide world had died that morning, leaving her alone in the streets of London.

It was the old, old story: a widow striving to work for herself and her only child, and sinking at last beneath the stroke of disease, after giving up one by one every article of furniture, and moving from place to place, until at last she was glad to find a refuge in the garret of one of these gaunt houses, where she had not lived many weeks before God called her to the mansion he had prepared for her.