Hexam, the riverman who had found the body floating in the Thames, made a living by watching in his boat for drowned bodies, and getting any rewards that might be offered for finding them. He had two children—a daughter, Lizzie, who used to row the boat for him, and a younger son, Charley.

Lizzie was a beautiful girl and a good daughter, and she never ceased to beseech her father to quit this ghastly business. She saved every cent she could get to give her brother some schooling, and kept urging the boy until he left home and became a teacher in a respectable school. For her own part she chose to stay by her father, hoping, in spite of[Pg 333] her hatred of his calling, to make him sometime something better.

The night Hexam found the body the lawyers who had the Harmon will in charge came to his house to see about it. One of them, a careless young man by the name of Eugene Wrayburn, was greatly struck with the beauty of Lizzie, and pitied her because of the life she was obliged to live, and this interest in her made him even more deeply interested in the case of the odd will and the strange murder.

Now Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, since they were rich, had offered a great reward for the arrest of the murderer of John Harmon. To get this reward and at the same time to avenge himself on his old partner Hexam for casting him off, Rogue Riderhood went to the lawyers and declared that it was Hexam himself who had really killed the man whose body he had found. Riderhood swore that Hexam had confessed the crime to him.

Wrayburn, knowing what a shock this charge against her father would be for Lizzie, went with the officers sent to seize him. But they made no arrest, for that night Hexam himself was drowned by accidentally falling from his own boat.

But the false charge against him lay heavy on Lizzie\'s mind. She hated the river and all that was connected with it, and soon found herself a decent lodging in another part of London.

Here she lived with a weird little dwarf of a[Pg 334] girl, so deformed that she could scarcely walk at all.

"I can\'t get up," she used to say to strangers, "because my back\'s bad and my legs are queer."

She had an odd face, with sharp gray eyes, and her wits were sharper yet. She worked at the strangest trade in the world. She had visiting cards on which was printed:


MISS JENNIE WREN
DOLLS\' DRESSMAKER

Dolls Attended at Their Own Residence

She was really and truly a dolls\' dressmaker and sat all day long making tiny frocks out of silk and ribbon. Every evening she would hobble out to the door of the theater or of a house where a ball was going on and wait until a lady came out in a beautiful costume; then she would take careful note of it and go home and dress a doll just like it. She even made a minister doll, in clerical collar and surplice, and used to rent him out for doll weddings.

But in spite of her trade she disliked children, because the rude ones of the neighborhood called her names through her keyhole and mimicked her bent back and crooked legs.[Pg 335]

"Don\'t talk to me of children," she often said; "I know their tricks and their manners!" and when she said this she would make a fierce little jab in the air with her needle, as if she were putting out somebody\'s eyes.

Jennie Wren had a miserable drunkard of a father, whom she called her &............