" "May I ask, madam," said Mr. Lynx, "if your suspicions had fastened on this boy, Ben, before you found the pawn ticket?"

To see the homes of those whom we know and respect, though they are but working men, stripped of every bit of furnitureto see long-cherished books and pictures sent one by one to the pawn-shop, that food may be hadand to see that food almost loathsome in kind, and insufficient in quantity,are hard, very hard things to bear.

Private letters and private conversations, which may touch living hearts in a thousand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as if they had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the hands of the pawn-broker!

It rained in torrents when the cab stopped at the passage which leads past the pawning-boxes to his private door.