Yet this was not unfrequently done.

Poverty is sometimes very cruel, yet often tender and compassionate.
One day, a few months after Mrs.Burke's death, Andy, who was beginning to drift farther and farther away from the little street, yet always managing to get back into it as darkness came on, that he might lay his tired body in some friendly place, got lost in strange localities.
He had wandered about for many hours, sitting now on some step or cellar-door or horse-block, watching the children at play and sometimes joining in their sports, when they would let him, with the spontaneous abandon of a puppy or a kitten, and now enjoying some street-show or attractive shop-window.

There was nothing of the air of a lost child about him.

For all that his manner betrayed, his home might have been in the nearest court or alley.

So, he wandered along from street to street without attracting the special notice of any--a bare-headed, bare-footed, dirty, half-clad atom of humanity not three years old.
Hungry, tired and cold, for the summer was gone and mid-autumn had brought its chilly nights, Andy found himself, as darkness fell, in a vile, narrow court, among some children as forlorn and dirty as himself.
It was Grubb's court--his old home--though in his memory there was of course no record of the place.
Too tired and hungry for play, Andy was sitting on the step of a wretched hovel, when the door opened and a woman called sharply the names of her two children.