"No, no, come with me; he keeps calling for you."
Then, still holding the policeman's hand closely clasped in hers, she followed the woman down the dirty dark stairs which led to the cellar where Jimmy lived.
The door of the squalid room stood wide open; two tallow candles stuck in empty bottles flared on the broken mantel-shelf above the rusty fireless grate; a battered old chair and a rickety table constituted the entire furniture of the room (if such it could be called), for on a heap of dirty rags lay little Jimmy. By his side, holding him in her arms, knelt Mrs. Turner, whilst a gentleman, evidently the parish doctor, was bathing his head, from which the blood was flowing. Lizzie Stevens was there, steeping linen in a basin for the doctor, and another policeman, no one else. I forgot. Crouching in the farthest corner, and glaring in drunken stupor around her, was the poor dying child's wretched mother. A broken bottle tightly grasped in her hands, fragments of which lay about the dirt-encrusted floor, told the tale, alas! too plainly. In her drunken fury she had slain her child!
Pollie felt safe directly she saw her own loved mother.
"O mother, what is it?" she whispered.
The dying boy heard her, softly as she had spoken.
"Little Pollie," he feebly murmured, and turned his dim eyes up to her.
"Dear Jimmy," she said, kneeling down beside him. He smiled as though at peace, and yet the life-blood was ebbing slowly away.
"Pollie," he said, "shall I go to the kingdom of heaven? Will Jesus put His hands on me, and bless me also?"
The little girl could not speak for sobbing, but she laid her soft cheek upon his clay-cold hand.