42 TROTTY’S WEDDING TOUR.

comes to drifts and sech, them chaps with brass buttons
keeps their eyes peeled. Took me up once last winter fur
roostin’ in a barrel. I was a gone goose fur fifteen days. Take
it in general, I’m independent in my way of life—hold on
there! That ’s the railroad. There ’s a ditch the off side of
you! It’s skeery travellin’ fur a stranger. But we’ve got
about there.”’

“ About there”? was quite out of the loops of streets, out
of the netted alleys, out of the knotted lanes that tied the
great city in. The three children had wandered off upon the
windy, oozy Charlestown flats, where there was an ugly pur-
ple mist, and much slush and lumber and old boots and ash-
heaps and wrecks of things.

“ There ’s my hotel,” said Bobbit at last.

The Irish boys looked, — north, east, south, west, — looked
again and looked hard. They saw nothing but an old wall
of an old burned building that hid them a little from the
road, and the road from them, a pile of bare bleached timber,
and an old locomotive boiler, rusty, and half buried in a heap
of rubbish. But the cold beans and the doughnuts were in
Bobbit’s pockets, and faith in Bobbit was in their hearts.

“Now,” said Bobbit, with an amazing chuckle for a boy
who was going to give to-morrow’s dinner to another boy,
“you walk right along as ef you was going to walk a mile,
and when you see I’ve doven— dive!” The next they
knew after that, Bobbit had “doven” into the old engine
boiler, and they after him.