smoke out, or in -- looking at the chimney-pots below, it is difficult to say which; and at one side of the room is a sack of Heaven knows what -- it is a dirty, filthy sack, greasy and black and evil looking. I cannot guess what was in it if I tried, but what was on it was a little child -- a neglected, ragged, grimed, and bare-legged little baby girl of four. There she sat, in the bare squalid room, perched on the sack, erect, motionless, expressionless, on duty. She was "a little sentinel," left to guard a baby that lay asleep on the bare boards behind her, its head on its arm, the ragged remains of what had been a shawl flung over its legs. That baby needed a sentinel to guard it, indeed. Had it crawled a foot or two it would have fallen head-foremost in that unprotected, yawning abyss of blackness below. In case of some such proceeding on its part, the child of four had been left "on guard." The furniture of the attic, whatever it was like, had been seized the week before for rent. The little sentinel's papa -- this we unearthed of the "deputy" of the house later on -- was a militiaman and away; the little sentinel's mamma has gone out on "a arrand," which, if it was anything like her usual "arrands," the deputy below informed us, would bring her home about dark, very much the worse for it.