"Please, sir," he sobbed, "I can't tell you."
"Please, Sir," he sobbed, "I can't tell you."
I paused, for it was now plain to me that I was torturing this poor boy, even while my desire was to be of service to him.
"Very well," I said; "I'll not ask you any more questions. Think of what I have said to you, and if, after you have done that, you would like to say anything on the subject to me, I often pass this spot, and I daresay you will recognise me—if you do not already know me by sight."
"Oh, yes, sir, I know you very well by sight, and thank you kindly, sir, for what you've said," he replied, still through his tears.
I was turning away, but suddenly remembered that, while I had been holding him in conversation, the brief time in which he could hope to sell his papers had been passing away from him.
"How many papers have you got left to sell?" I asked.
"Two dozen, sir," he answered, after rapidly counting them.
"All right!" I said; "I'll clear you out. Here's a shilling for them. Take them to my chambers over yonder, and give them to the housekeeper for me." And I gave him my card.
On returning late at night, I found the pile of Echos encumbering my writing-table; and my talk with the boy of whom I had bought them returned fully, not to say importunately, to my mind before I could find release from it in sleep. One fact, in particular, kept returning to my mind—that, though I had spoken to the poor lad about his mother, I had not asked him anything about his father—had, in truth, not once thought of that individual, if there was such a person extant.
A week or ten days passed without my seeing my newspaper boy, though I had many times been by the spot which I supposed to be his beat, if that is the right word to use in that connection; but, one morning, on reaching my chambers, I found him there waiting to see me.
He was looking very pale and miserable, as if he had been ill—as if he were still ill, in fact—and I noticed that there were discoloured circles about his eyes. I asked what had been the matter with him, and he told me he had been laid up ever since I saw him last.
This was his story: Nearly as soon as I left him, a few minutes only after he had delivered the papers at my chambers, he was set upon by the boy who had wanted him to share with him the shilling he had seen me drop, and by this young brute and some others of his kidney had been hustled, savagely beaten, and plundered of all the money he had. His eyes were both blackened, his head was cut and otherwise hurt, and he had hardly strength enough left to get from the Strand across Westminster Bridge to Stangate, where his mother lived. Then his mother had bound up his head as well as she could, and for two days he had been unconscious and delirious; and after that he was so weak as not to be able to go out of his mother's room; and at last, when he was strong enough to go out, he had no money to buy any papers, and—and———
"And then you thought of coming to see me?" I suggested.
"No, sir—it wasn't in that way, sir. When I told my mother how it was the
