"Your father did look very ill; and it is a pity he did not send you to Uttoxeter in his stead.

You are a great boy now, and would rejoice, I am sure, to do something for your poor father, who has done so much for you." The lad made no reply.

But again his imagination set to work and conjured up another picture of poor Michael Johnson.

He was standing in the hot sunshine of the market-place, and looking so weary, sick, and disconsolate, that the eyes of all the crowd were drawn to him.

"Had this old man no son," the people would say among themselves, "who might have taken his place at the bookstall while the father kept his bed ?" And perhaps, but this was a terrible thought for Sam!--perhaps his father would faint away and fall down in the marketplace, with his gray hair in the dust and his venerable face as deathlike as that of a corpse.