FullReads

It was not plain sailing, by any means, owing to the collection of tin cans and bottles through which I had to pick my way, but I climbed some frail wooden steps, and stood at length on the landing of Number 32-1/2.

The door was open, and there sat Patsy, “minding” the Kennett baby, a dull little lump of humanity, whose brain registered impressions so slowly that it would play all day long with an old shoe without exhausting its possibilities.

Patsy himself was dirtier than ever, and much more sullen and gloomy. The traces of tears on his cheeks made my heart leap into my throat. “Oh, Patsy,” I exclaimed, “I am so glad to find you! We expected you all day, and were afraid you weren’t well.”

Not a word of response.

“We have a chair all ready for you; it is standing right under one of the plant-shelves, and there are three roses in bloom to-day!”

Still not a word.

“And I had to tell the dog story without you!”

The effect of this simple statement was very different from what I had anticipated. I thought I knew what a child was likely to do under every conceivable set of circumstances, but Patsy was destined to be more than once a revelation to me.

He dashed a book of colored advertisements that he held into the farthest corner of the room, threw himself on the floor at full length and beat it with his hands, while he burst into a passion of tears. “There! there!” he cried between his sobs, “I told ’em you’d tell it! I told ’em you’d tell it! I told ’em you’d–but oh, I thought maybe you wouldn’t!” His wails brought Mrs. Kennett from a back piazza where she was washing.

“Are you the teacher o’ the Kids Guards, ‘m?”

“Yes.” It did not strike me at the time, in my anxiety, what a sympathetic rendering of the German word this was; but we afterwards found that “Kindergarten” was thus translated in Anna Street.

“Patsy couldn’t go to-day, ‘m, on account of him hevin’ no good boots, ‘m, Jim not bein’ paid off till Wednesday, ‘n me hevin’ no notice he hed no clean shirt, ‘m, this not bein’ his clean-shirt week, ‘m. He takes it awful hard about that there story, ‘m. I told him as how you’d be after tellin’ another one next week, but it seems nothin’ will comfort him.”

“Ev’rybuddy’s allers lyin’ to me,” he moaned; “there warn’t another dog picture like that in the hull room!”

“Don’t take no notice of him, ‘m, an’ he’ll git over it; he’s subjick to these spells of takin’ on like. Set up, Pat, an’ act decent! Tell the lady you’ll come when you git your boots.”

“Patsy, boy, stop crying a minute and listen to me,” I said. “If Mrs. Kennett is willing, I have some things that will fit you; you shall come right back with me now,–all the children have gone,–and you and I will be alone with the sunshine and the birds and the fishes, as we were the other day, and I will tell you the dog story just as I told it to the other children this morning.”

He got up slowly, rubbed his tattered sleeve across his wet cheek, and looked at me searchingly to see if I might be trusted; then he limped to the sink, treated his face and hands to a hasty but energetic scrub, seized his fragment of a hat, gave his brief trousers a hitch which had the air of being the last exquisite touch to a faultless toilet, and sat down on the landing to mend his twine shoe-lace.

“Who is your neighbor in Number 32, Mrs. Kennett?” I asked as I rose to go. “I went there to find you.”

“Did you indeed, ‘m? Well, I hope she treated you civil, ‘m, though it don’t be much in her line. She’s a Mis’ Mooney, ‘m. I know her, but she don’t know me anny more sence she’s riz in the wurrld. She moved out of this house whin I moved into it, but none of us ladies here is good enough for her to ‘sociate with now, ‘m! You see her husband was in the rag, sack, and bottle business, ‘m, ‘n a wealthy gintleman friend set him up in a fish-cart, an’ it’s kind of onsettled her, ‘m! Some folks can’t stan’ prosperity. If ‘t bed bin gradjooal like, she might have took it more natcheral; but it come all of a suddent, an’ she’s that purse-proud now, ‘m, that she’ll be movin’ up on Nob Hill ef she don’t hev no stroke o’ bad luck to show ‘er her place! Good day, ‘m!”