At a little distance, in a large arm-chair, sits Lord Arlington, his face beaming with happiness as he looks upon them; while nestling in his lap, her little white arms around him, lies a lovely child, his own adopted daughter—his second Mabel.
THE LUCKY PENNY.
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BY MRS. S. C. HALL.
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(Continued from page 315.)
CHAPTER II.
The next morning saw Richard at the bookseller’s door, full ten minutes before the appointed time. Around his slender throat was the promised handkerchief; and there was an air of gentility about the lad, though under evident restraint, in his threadbare best clothes. He was neither tall nor large of his age, yet he had outgrown his dress: to look at him when his cloth cap (from which depended a worn tassel, brown with age,) was on, you would have thought that his eyes were too large for his small, delicate features; but when that was removed, and the pale, full, well-developed brow, shaded by an abundance of light-brown hair, was displayed, then the schoolmaster’s son had an air, despite his ill-fitting clothes, his patched shoes, his sunken cheeks, and the cold, mercilessly blue “handkerchief” round his throat, of the highest and most earnest intelligence. What most rendered him different from other boys, however, was his frequent habit of uplooking: there was nothing weak or silly in this manner, nor did his eyes wander away from the things around him, as if he heard them not; his large, quick eyes, bright and gray, were rapid and observant; but it was as if he carried what he saw below to be judged above; his leisure looks were “uplooking,” his slight figure was erect, and he never slouched in his gait, or dragged his feet after him, as many lads are apt to do. As he stood at his new master’s door, in the gray fog of a London morning, he longed for the door to open; he longed to begin work; he thought the clocks were all wrong; and, though there was hardly a creature moving in the streets, except a stray cat or a slip-shod charwoman, he would have it that the entire London population were a set of slug-a-beds, unworthy of the name of Britons; for he had great veneration for Britons, and when he used to write impromptu copies on the broken slate, his favorite sentence was “Rule Britannia.”
At last he heard doors opening beneath the area gratings, and in due time the shop-door was unbarred by a not very clean-faced woman, who inquired—