than could be looked for from the casual visitors and petty gentry
around, so that sundry houses that were forbidden ground to district
visitors, were ready to grant them a welcome.

One of these belonged to the most able lacemaker in the place, a
hard-working woman, who kept seven little pupils in a sort of
cupboard under the staircase, with a window into the back garden,
"because," said she, "they did no work if they looked out into the
front, there were so many gapsies;" these gapsies consisting of the
very scanty traffic of the further end of Mackarel Lane. For ten
hours a day did these children work in a space just wide enough for
them to sit, with the two least under the slope of the stairs,
permitted no distraction from their bobbins, but invaded by their
mistress on the faintest sound of tongues. Into this hotbed of
sprigs was admitted a child who had been a special favourite at
school, an orphan niece of the head of the establishment. The two
brothers had been lost together at sea; and while the one widow
became noted for her lace, the other, a stranger to the art, had
maintained herself by small millinery, and had not sacrificed her
little girl to the Moloch of lace, but had kept her at school to a
later age than usual in the place. But the mother died, and the
orphan was at once adopted by the aunt, with the resolve to act the
truly kind part by her, and break her in to lacemaking. That
determination was a great blow to the school visitors; the girls were
in general so young, or so stupefied with their work, that an
intelligent girl like Lovedy Kelland was no small treasure to them;
there were designs of making her a pupil teacher in a few years, and
offers and remonstrances rained in upon her aunt. But they had no
effect; Mrs. Kelland was persuaded that the child had been spoilt by
learning, and in truth poor Lovedy was a refractory scholar; she was