At last, in the early morning, he heard what seemed to be the sound of footsteps, and raising his voice to its highest pitch he soon had the joy of seeing that some one was approaching. It was a clergyman who had been spending the night by the bedside of a dying man, and was returning home with the first gleams of the morning. He was horrified to see a little child, pale, jacketless, shivering, with eyes swollen with tears, and a face contorted with pain.
"Why are you here, my boy? What are you doing?" he asked anxiously.
"I am holding back the sea!" said the little hero.
And it was literally true--that child's arm had held back the enemy that would have come in with a flood, carrying death and terrible destruction.
The "it" was his supper. Dinner had been a movable feast that day, tea indefinitely postponed, and Patch was beginning to fear that supper also was fading away beyond his grasp.
"And I may go on whistling till that flute bursts itself before I get a halfpenny," he remarked to himself in a tone of intense injury, eyeing the "flute" (which was really a penny whistle) anxiously as he rubbed it on his wet sleeve with a view to improving the notes. "All this day and not a----"
"I say, Patch," broke in a mournful voice from behind, "couldn't you lend me twopence just till to-morrow? It's to get some supper; I haven't sold a single box since morning."
"Supper!" echoed Patch, turning sharply on his supplicant. "Do you think I'd be blowing away here if I didn't want a supper myself? You'd better go on to the bank and ask them."
"I've asked everybody, and it's no use," was the weary answer.
"Well it's no use here either, Mike; if I get any I'll want it myself."
Mike listlessly wandered on a few steps farther up the dingy road, and then collapsed, a mere bundle of rags, under the shadow of a doorway.
"You'll not get much of a supper sitting there," commented Patch, setting off himself in quest of a more appreciative audience.
At the corner of the next street was a big hospital, and Patch betook himself thither. He had received stray coppers occasionally from the visitors who came and went through the ponderous iron gates, and what had been once might be again. Fortune was going to favour him at last, he thought, for coming down the steps was a gentle-faced old lady in a curiously-shaped bonnet and grey gown. Patch realised that it was a case of "whistling for it" now, and no mistake; so he put on his most dejected expression and piped out "The Last Rose of Summer" with truly startling emphasis.