“Yes; just on the corner of the parapet.”
“Preserve us,” cried the old lady, leaning out of the window again and looking.
“Lean out as far as you can, mum,” cried the sweep.
“I am,” said the old lady.
“A little further, then, and you’ll see him.”
Here was another laugh, and Jacob Gray, with a great effort, succeeded in turning the corner of the roof just as the old lady produced a tremendous rattle, which she began springing violently at the window, to the rapturous delight of the crowd below.
“He’s gone into Smith-street,” cried several of the throng, and a rush round the corner was made to keep Jacob Gray in sight.
When he got round the corner of the roof which had cost him so much trouble, the first thing that poor Jacob Gray did was to fall over a pail that was set out at an attic window, into a dirty drain full of black slimy mud, interspersed here and there with delicate streaks of green and blue. When he recovered from the shock of his fall, his first thought was to rise as quickly as possible, but his second was to lie where he was, as by so doing he was hidden by the parapet from the gaze of those in the street.
But Jacob Gray was not at all aware of the ready invention and cunning of boys in the streets of London, and it was with a curse that, if curses were effective as implements of death would have destroyed both the sweep and the baker’s boy he heard the latter suggest,—
“Oh, he is in the drain—I know he is—give us a stone, and I’ll hit him.”