Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOBODY’S CHILD. OMB of us are old enough to remember a hot, close, misty summer?called the cholera summer?in which people stood in knots at street corners, and men went reluctantly to work, fearful when they returned of finding death within their households. Sad as this time was, yet it had its bright side, for many hearts were drawn closely together; much love, charity, and kindnesssprang up in stony, barren places; many old hatreds were extinguished for ever, and many came out of the bitter trial wiser and better, because suffering, men. In one of those smoky, pent-up London streets, where everything is dirty and cheerless, at the open doorway of a house were seated two persons, a man and a child. The child was a girl of seven or eight summers?if summers ever come and go in such a place?pale and sad, but beautiful and graceful even in her dirt and rags. Her companion was a middle-aged, bronzed, dusty, grizzly man?a wandering pedlar; and though many might have thought him repulsive as he sat there smoking his short, black pipe, the child looked upon him with other eyes. Old Gipsy Jack, as he was called, was always a favourite with little Mary; now he had become something more?an adopted father. Little Mary’s father and mother both died of the pestilence, and Gipsy Jack, with his wife and infant boy, might have died, too, like many others, had they not been on the tramp in Surrey at the time. When they returned, they found the little orphan crouching in the dark and filthy passage of the low lodging-house, ragged, miserable, and hungry?nobody’s child. Gipsy Jack could neither read nor write: as to understanding workhouses, institutions, and such things, that was far above his poor powers. Many virtuous persons looked upon Gipsy Jack as a thief, which he certainly was no…
