"Perhaps the smoke was too much for him--he seems ill and thin," and he took the boy's long lean fingers in his own.

"His cheek is hollow!--what do I know but it may be with fasting?
Pooh! I was a brute.

Hush, coachee, hush! don't talk so loud, and be d---d to you--he will certainly be off!" and the man softly and creepingly encircled the boy's waist with his huge arm.
"Now, then, to shift his head; so-so,--that's right." Philip's sallow cheek and long hair were now tenderly lapped on the soliloquist's bosom.

"Poor wretch! he smiles; perhaps he is thinking of home, and the butterflies he ran after when he was an urchin--they never come back, those days;--never--never--never! I think the wind veers to the east; he may catch cold;"-- and with that, the man, sliding the head for a moment, and with the tenderness of a woman, from his breast to his shoulder, unbuttoned his coat (as he replaced the weight, no longer unwelcomed, in its former part), and drew the lappets closely round the slender frame of the sleeper, exposing his own sturdy breast--for he wore no waistcoat--to the sharpening air.

Thus cradled on that stranger's bosom, wrapped from the present and dreaming perhaps--while a heart scorched by fierce and terrible struggles with life and sin made his pillow--of a fair and unsullied future, slept the fatherless and friendless boy..