As she spoke the door was flung wide open, and an overgrown but very handsome girl peered out.
“Oh! father, I thought it was your voice,” she said. “Mother, is that you? Come in, quick. Here’s Bobby brought home in a cab with a broken leg.”
On hearing this the man’s voice softened, and, entering the room, he went up to a heap of straw in one corner whereon our little friend Bobby Frog—the street-Arab—lay.
“Hallo! Bobby, wot’s wrong with ’ee? You ain’t used to come to grief,” said the father, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and giving him a rough shake.
Things oftentimes “are not what they seem.” The shake was the man’s mode of expressing sympathy, for he was fond of his son, regarding him, with some reason, as a most hopeful pupil in the ways of wickedness.
“It’s o’ no use, father,” said the boy, drawing his breath quickly and knitting his brows, “you can’t stir me up with a long pole now. I’m past that.”
“What! have ’ee bin runned over?”
“No—on’y run down, or knocked down.”
“Who did it? On’y give me his name an’ address, an’ as sure as my name’s Ned I’ll—”
He finished the sentence with a sufficiently expressive scowl and clenching of a huge fist, which had many a time done great execution in the prize ring.