Page:A Child of the Jago - Arthur Morrison.djvu/382

 swarmed the Jago through. Some half-dismantled houses stood at hand, and he made for the nearest.

There were cellars under these houses, reached from the back-yards. Many a Jago had been born, had lived, and had died in such a place. A cellar would hide him for an hour, while he groped himself clean as he might. Broken brickwork littered the space that had been the back-yard. Feeling in the dark for the steps, which stood in a little pit, his foot turned on a stone, and he pitched headlong.

The cellar itself was littered with rubbish, and he lay among it a little while, breathless and bruised. When he tried to raise, he found his ankle useless. It was the old sprain, got at Mother Gapp's before his lagging, and ever ready to assert itself. He sat among the brickbats to pull off the boot—that was foul and sticky too—and he rubbed the ankle. He had been a fool to think of the cellar: