refused to come in with her, and had run to the corner of Henrietta
Street, as she averred, where she had left him, to come and fetch
authoritative assistance.

The child did not come home, and all search for him proved vain
throughout the crowded market and the adjoining thoroughfares, thronged
with people and choked with carts and wagons, and swarming with the
blocked-up traffic, which had to make its way to and from the great mart
through avenues far narrower and more difficult of access than they are
now. There were not then, either, those invaluable beings, policemen,
standing at every corner to enforce order and assist the helpless. These
then were not; and no inquiry brought back any tidings of the poor
little lost boy. My mother was ill, and I do not think she was told of
the child's disappearance, but my father went to and fro with the face
and voice of a distracted man; and I well remember the look with which
he climbed a narrow outside stair leading only to a rain-water cistern,
with the miserable apprehension that his child might have clambered up
and fallen into it. The neighborhood was stirred with sympathy for the
agony of the poor father, and pitying gossip spreading the news through
the thronged market-place, where my father's name and appearance were
familiar enough to give a strong personal feeling to the compassion
expressed. A baker's boy, lounging about, caught up the story of the
lost child, and described having seen a "pretty little chap with curly
hair, in a brown holland pinafore," in St. James's Square. Thither the
searchers flew, and the child was found, tired out with his
self-directed wandering, but apparently quite contented, fast asleep on
the door-step of one of the lordly houses of that aristocratic square.
He was so remarkably beautiful that he must have attracted attention
before long, and _might_ perhaps have been restored to his home; but God
knows what an age of horror and anguish was lived through by my father