In order to carry out this resolve, she went into the scullery, filled the copper, and lit the fire. 

 Presently the members of the family, three small boys and a smaller girl, came down to breakfast en route to school. They looked wonderingly at the creature on the sofa, with great curiosity in their half frightened eyes. Their father told them sternly to keep away from it, to get on with their breakfasts, not to make a noise, and to clear off to school. 

 "Is it a boy or a girl?" Alfie asked Johnnie, in a thrilling whisper as soon as father had retired to help Mother in the scullery. 

 "A girl, o' course." 

 There was some excuse for Johnnie: there was something that looked exactly like a girl in the sleeping face. The rest was hidden by the coat. 

 The family was soon packed off to school, Johnnie "with a flea in his ear" for having cleaned his boots imperfectly the night before. Mother then cleared away the remains of breakfast, and the Foreman Shunter fetched a fair-sized zinc bath out of the washhouse, pushed back the table, and set it down before the fire. He filled it with warm water from the copper, and then gave the sleeper a shake and said, 

 "Now, then, boy." 

 The boy roused himself with a little whimper of protest. He had not been very fast asleep; the police in varying forms of their activity were still hovering round the outskirts of his mind. He began to cry miserably at the sight of the zinc bath, which supplied a forgotten link in an awful chain of memories. Yes, this was the police station after all. He remembered now quite well how they gave him a bath before they ... 

 "What are you crying for?" asked Mother.  "I'm not going to hurt you, my boy. Nice warm bath. Bind up your feet. Then you can go to sleep again." 

 Perhaps it wasn't the police station, after all. Certainly that institution as he knew it had no Mother and no warm tea and no fried bacon, and no sofa and no old coat. 

 Mother removed the filthy shirt and the tattered knickerbockers with uncompromising but not indelicate hands. 

 "Them had better be burnt, Job," she said sharply, as she gave them to the Foreman Shunter to throw into the back yard. 

 "Better ha' done this job in the scullery, Mother," said he. 

 "Too cold...."  She took the 

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