Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/607

Rh into a whole court full of houses "if she had her rights." Worldly little devil, I would stand about, musingly fitting my bare feet into cracked bricks and crevices of the damp cellar floor—walking over my grandfather's body, so to speak, into the court full of houses, and selling them for meat and drink, and clothes to wear.

At last a change came down into our cellar. The universal came down even as low as that—so will it mount to any heighten which a human creature can perch—and brought other changes with it.

We had a heap of I don't know what foul litter in the darkest corner, which we called "the bed." For three days mother lay upon it without getting up, and then began at times to laugh. If I had ever heard her laugh before, it had been so seldom that the strange sound frightened me. It frightened father too; and we took it by turns to give her water. Then she began to move her head from side to side and sing. After that, she getting no better, father fell a-laughing and a-singing; and then there was only I to give them both water, and they both died.

When I was lifted out of the cellar by two men, of whom one came peeping down alone first, and ran away and brought the other, I could hardly bear the light of the street. I was sitting in the roadway blinking at it, and at a ring of people collected around me, but not close to me, when, true to my character of worldly little devil, I broke silence by saying, "I am hungry and thirsty!"

"Does he know they are dead?" asked one of another.

"Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever!" asked a third of me, severely.

"I don't know what it is to be dead. I suppose it meant that, when the cup rattled against their teeth, and the water spilt over them. I am hungry and thirsty."

That was all I had to say about it.

The ring of people widened outward from the inner side as I looked around me; and I smelt vinegar, and what I knew to be camphor, thrown in toward where I sat. Presently some one put a great vessel of smoking vinegar on the ground near me; and then they all looked