but after staring stolidly for a moment or two at her visitors through
her dishevelled hair, turned and cowered over the hearth again, her
elfish locks falling forward and hiding her face.

The wretched smoky fire they maintained was the final triumph and
revelation of their utter shiftlessness. With square miles of woodland
all about them, they had prepared no billets of suitable size. The man
had merely cut down two small trees, lopped off their branches, and
dragged them into the room. Their butt-ends were placed together on the
hearth, whence the logs stretched like the legs of a compass to the two
further corners of the room. Amy, in the uncertain light, had nearly
stumbled over one of them. As the logs burned away they were shoved
together on the hearth from time to time, the woman mechanically throwing
on dry sticks from a pile near her when the greed wood ceased to blaze.
Both man and woman were partially intoxicated, and the latter was so
stupefied as to be indifferent to the presence of strangers. While
Leonard was seeking to obtain from the man some intelligible account of
their condition, and bringing in his gifts, Amy gazed around, with her
fair young face full of horror and disgust. Then her attention was
arrested by a feeble cry from a cradle in a dusky corner beyond the
woman, and to the girl's heart it was indeed a cry of distress, all the
more pathetic because of the child's helplessness, and unconsciousness of
the wretched life to which it seemed inevitably destined.

She stepped to the cradle's side, and saw a pallid little creature, puny
and feeble from neglect. Its mother paid no attention to its wailing, and
when Amy asked if she might take it up, the woman's mumbled reply was
unintelligible.

After hesitating a moment Amy lifted the child, and found it scarcely