THE BAKER.—ON AND ON.—THE CHURCH BELL.—A DIGRESSION.—A FAMILIAR HYMN.—THE BOYS’ HOME.  
Jan stopped at last from lack of breath to go on.  His feet had been winged by terror, and he looked back even now with fear to see the Cheap Jack’s misshapen figure in pursuit.  He had had no food for hours, but the pence the dark gentleman had given him were in his chalk pouch, and he turned into the first baker’s shop he came to to buy a penny loaf.  It was a small shop, served by a pleasant-faced man, who went up and down, humming, whistling, and singing,—
 
“Like tiny pipe of wheaten straw,
The wren his little note doth swell,
And every living thing that flies”—
 
“A penny loaf, please,” said Jan, laying down the money, and the man turned and said, “Why, you be the boy that draws on the pavement!”
 
For a moment Jan was silent.  It presented itself to him as a new difficulty, that he was likely to be recognized.  There was a flour barrel by the counter, and as he pondered he began mechanically to sift the flour through his finger and thumb.
 
“You be used to flour seemingly,” said the baker, smiling.  “Was ’ee ever in a mill? ’ee seems to have a miller’s thumb.”
 
In a few minutes Jan had told his story, and had learned, with amazement and delight, that the baker had not only been a windmiller’s man, but had worked in Master Lake’s tower mill.  He was, in fact, the man who had helped George the very night that Jan arrived.  But he confirmed the fact that it was Sal who brought Jan, by his account of her, and he seemed to think that she was probably his mother.  He was very kind.  He refused to take payment for the loaf, and went, humming, whistling, and singing, away to get Jan some bacon to eat with it.
 
When he was alone, Jan’s hand went back to the flour, and he sifted and thought.  The baker was kind, but he had said that “it was an ackerd thing for a boy to quarrel with’s parents.”  Jan felt that he expected him to go home.  Perhaps at this moment the baker had gone, with the best intentions, to fetch the Cheap Jack, and bring about a family reunion.  Terror had become an abiding state of Jan’s mind, and it seized him afresh, like a palsy.  He left the penny on the counter, and shook the flour-dust from his fingers, and, stealing with side glances of dread into the street, he sped away once more.
 
He had no knowledge of localities.  He ran “on and on,” as people do in fairy tales.  Sometimes he rested on a doorstep, sometimes he hid in a shutter box or under an archway.  He had learned to avoid the police, and he moved quickly from one dark corner to another with a hunted look in his black eyes.  Late in the night he found a heap of straw near a warehouse, on which he lay down and fell asleep.  At eight o’clock the next morning he was awakened by the clanging of a bell, and he jumped up in time to avoid a porter who was coming to the warehouse, and ran “on and on.”
 
It was a bright morning, and the sun was shining; but Jan’s feet were sore, and his bones ached from cold and weariness.  Yesterday the struggle to escape the Cheap Jack had kept him up, but now he could only feel his utter loneliness and misery.  There was not a friendly sound in all the noises of the great city,—the street cries of food he could not buy, the quarrelling, the laughter with which he had no concern, the tramp of strange feet, the roar of traffic and prosperity in which he had no part.
 
He was so lonely, so desolate, that when a sound came to him which was familiar and pleasant, and full of old and good and happy associations, it seemed to bring his sad life to a climax, to give just one strain too much to his powers of endurance.  Like the white lights he put to his black sketches, it seemed to bring the darkness of his life into relief, and he felt as if he could bear no more, and would like to sit down and die.  The sound came through the porch of a church.  It was the singing of a hymn,—one of Charles Wesley’s hymns, of which Master Swift was so fond.
 
The sooty iron gates were open, and so was the door.  Jan crept in to peep, and he caught sight of a stained window full of pale faces, which seemed to beckon him, and he went into the church and no one molested him.
 
There is a very popular bit of what I venture to think a partly false philosophy which comes up again and again in magazines and story books in the shape of satirical contrasts between the words of the General Confession, or the Litany, and the particular materials in which the worshippers, the intercessors, and the confessing sinners happen to be clothed.  But, since broadcloth has never yet been made stout enough to keep temptation from the soul, and silk has proved no protection against sorrow, I confess that I never could see any thing more incongruous in the confessions and petitions of handsomely dressed people than of ragged ones.  That any sinner can be “miserable” in satin, seems impossible, or at least offensive, to some minds; perhaps to those who know least of the reckless, callous light-heartedness of the most ragged reprobates.
 
This has nothing to do, it seems to me, with the fact that a certain degree of outlay on dress is criminal, on several grave accounts; nor even with the incongruous spectacle of a becoming bonnet arranged during the Litany by the tightly gloved fingers of a worshipper, who would probably not be any the more devout for being uncomfortably conscious of bad clothes.  An old friend of my childhood used to tell me that she always thought a good deal of her dress before going to church, that she might quite forget it when there.
 
Surely, dress has absolutely nothing to do with devotion.  And the impertinent patronage of worshippers in “fustian” is at least as offensive as the older-fashioned vulgarity of pride in congregations who “come in their own carriages.”  And I do protest against the flippant inference that good clothes for the body must lower the assumptions of the spirit, or make repentance insincere; which I n............