FullReads

And this was how the name of Easter, the old black candy-woman, came to be written upon their little book as their chosen object of charity for the coming year.

The name was not written, however, without some opposition, some discussion, and considerable argument. There were several of the ten who could not easily consent to give up the idea of sending their little moneys to an Indian or a Chinaman–or to a naked black fellow in his native Africa.

There is something attractive in the savage who sticks bright feathers in his hair, carries a tomahawk, and wears moccasins upon his nimble feet. Most young people take readily to the idea of educating a picturesque savage and teaching him that the cast-off clothes they send him are better than his beads and feathers. The picturesque quality is very winning, find it where we may.

People at a distance may see how very much more interesting and picturesque the old black woman, Easter, was than any of these, but she did not seem so to the ten good little maidens who finally agreed to adopt her for their own–to find her out in her home life, and to help her.

With them it was an act of simple pity–an act so pure in its motive that it became in itself beautiful.

Perhaps the idea gained a little following from the fact that Easter Sunday was approaching, and there was a pleasing fitness in the old woman’s name when it was proposed as an object for their Easter offerings. But this is a slight consideration.

Certainly when three certain very pious little maidens started out on the following Saturday morning to find the old woman, Easter, they were full of interest in their new object, and chattered like magpies, all three together, about the beautiful things they were going to do for her.

Somehow, it never occurred to them that they might not find her either at the Jackson Street and St. Charles Avenue corner, or down near Lee Circle, or at the door of the Southern Athletic Club, at the corner of Washington and Prytania streets.

But they found her at none of the familiar haunts; they did not discover any trace of her all that day, or for quite a week afterward. They had inquired of the grocery-man at the corner where she often rested–of the portresses of several schools where she sometimes peddled her candy at recess-time, and at the bakery where she occasionally bought a loaf of yesterday’s bread. But nobody remembered having seen her recently.

Several people knew and were pleased to tell how she always started out in the direction of the swamp every evening when the gas was lit in the city, and that she turned out over the bridge along Melpomene Street, stopping to collect stray bits of cabbage leaves and refuse vegetables where the bridgeway leads through Dryades Market. Some said that she had a friend there, who hid such things for her to find, under one of the stalls, but this may not have been true.

It was on the Saturday morning after their first search that three little “Daughters of the King” started out a second time, determined if possible to trace Old Easter to her hiding-place.

It was a shabby, ugly, and crowded part of town in which, following the bridged road, and inquiring as they went, they soon found themselves.

For a long time it seemed a fruitless search, and they were almost discouraged when across a field, limping along before a half-shabby, fallen gate, they saw an old, lame, yellow dog.

It was the story of her sharing her dinner with the dog on the street that had won these eager friends for the old woman, and so, perhaps, from an association of ideas, they crossed the field, timidly, half afraid of the poor miserable beast that at once attracted and repelled them.

But they need not have feared. As soon as he knew they were visitors, the social fellow began wagging his little stump of a tail, and with a sort of coaxing half-bark asked them to come in and make themselves at home.