Then there was a funeral and a long drive in a carriage with much crape and black about, and Daddy was left in a deep yellow hole with muddy water at the bottom. And peace came again to the widow and orphans.
Peace, but starvation, for the mother's wage did not suffice to buy bread for them all. The rent got behind, and finally, with many tears and much pressure from various black-coated men, who seemed always worrying at the door, he and Mabel had been taken to a big, terrible place called a workhouse. And, after some preliminary misery at another place, called a "Receiving Home," wretchedness had culminated in this strange vastness of loneliness and greenery. Only two days had passed, but they seemed like years, and he trembled lest his sentence here should be a life-one, and he would never see his mother again. He had not killed nor robbed nor hurt any one, and he wondered with the bewilderment of seven years why men and women could be so cruel to him. Then he determined to run away. It had not taken long in the train. If he started soon, he would be home by bedtime.
"Where's London?" he asked a boy who was hitting a smaller one to pass the time.
Near him stood one of the teachers, but as a natural enemy the boy felt he was not to be trusted, and did not ask him.
Then the bell rang for dinner, and they took their seats round the long, bare tables, in front of a steaming plate of stewed meat and vegetables. His pulses were beating with excitement at his secret plot, and the food was like sawdust in his mouth. Afternoon school began, and he sat with the resigned boredom of his kind, chanting in shrill chorus the eternal truths of the multiplication table.
Then some other subject, equally dull, was started, when suddenly his heart leaped to his mouth, and he nearly fell off the bench with the unexpected joy of it, for the teacher had brought up the intimate question of his soul: "Which is the way to London?"
The blood throbbed so loud in his ears that he could scarcely hear the answer. "London lies south of this schoolroom. If you walked out of that window, and followed your nose up the white road yonder, it would take you to London."
Other strange instruction followed--how to find north and south, and all about the sun and moon--but he purposely refrained from attending. By the act of God the position of London had been miraculously revealed to him, and he clung fast to that knowledge, so that his brain was burning with the effort of concentration.