The Hole in the Wall

I looked round the room and considered, as well as my sodden little head would permit. I had never been in the London Dock, which was a wonderful place, as I had gathered from my grandfather's descriptions: a paradise where sugar lay about the very ground in lumps, and where you might eat it if you would, so long as you brought none away. But here was my home, with nobody else to take care of it, and I felt some muddled sense of a new responsibility. "I'm 'fraid I can't leave the place, Gran'fa' Nat," I said, with a dismal shake of the head. "Father might come home, an' he wouldn't know, an'----"

"An' so--an' so you think you've got to stop an' keep house?" my grandfather asked, bending his face down to mine.

The prospect had been oppressing my muzzy faculties all day. If I escaped being taken away, plainly I must