Faith Gartney's Girlhood

Y Mc

auty waitin

y that mak

we ever,

hath not be

ooking also vaguely, wonderingly, for "something to happen"-that indefinite "something" w

t into such a life as this has been, that began, or at least has its

when she was taken in there wi

went straight down, thirty feet, and out of life. Out of life, where he had a trim, comfortable young wife-one happy little child, for whom skies were as blue, and grass as green, and

ng left for Glory and her helpless grandmother but the poorhouse as a present refuge; and to the one

ath, and go on thickening around us, and pressing upon us until the

she had served four faithful years of her maidenhood, and who came down at once with comforts and congratul

turning back the bedclothes a little from the tiny, red, puckered face, wi

a halo round her head like

lady once't of the very name, in the ould country. Miss Gloriana O'Dowd she was; an' the beauty o' County Kerry. My Lady Ki

for years; and when a box of tokens from the far, foreign lands came back to Stonebury a while after, there was a grand shawl for Rosa, and a pretty braided frock for the baby, and a rosary that Glory keeps to this hour, that had been blessed by the Pope. That was

out under the stoop in summer; how she rolled down the green bank behind the house; and, when she grew big enough to be trusted with a knife, was sent out to dig dandelions in the spring, and how an older girl went with her round the village, and sold them from house to house. How, at last

ry, of the life that was given, in its every young pulse and breath, to sordid toil for

ts out in Budd Street-a street of a single side, wedged in between the back yards of more pretentious mansions

whom, at her peril, she must "keep pacified"-i. e., amused and content, while its mother was otherwise busy. For her, poor child-baby that she still, a

llow locks which, under more favoring circumstances of place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely golden curls, stood up continually in thei

cut off and topknots taken down, and coarse shoes, and stockings cut out of the legs of those whereof Mrs. Grubbling had worn out the extremities? Do you think she didn't feel the difference, and that it

priates continually into his own. This is a world of hints

scontent; yet a noble discontent, and curbed with a grand, unconscious patience. She scoured her knives; she shuffled along the streets on hasty errands; she went up and down the house in her small menial duties; she put on and off her coarse, repulsive clothing; she uttered herself in her common, ignorant forms of speech; she show

met in the streets. She imagined it would be a complete and utter happiness just once to feel it falling in its wealth about her shoulders or dropping against her cheeks; and to be able to look at it with her eyes, and twist her fingers in it at the ends. And so, when it got to be its longest, and began to make itself troublesome about her forehead, and to peep below her shabby bonnet in h

alf of her little servant's thought, and so pronouncing from her own half wit. Then the great shears came out, and the instinct of

y in her arms, and so quite at the mercy of Master Herbert Clarence, who defiantly skipped oft down the avenues, and almost out of her sight-she looking after him in helpless dismay, lest he should get a splash or a tumble, or be altogether lost; and then

f good times in the wor

with the children, how jubilantly she trained the battered chairs in line, and put herself a

and essence of the very

n errand and come back too late-which reasons, with a multitude of others, constantly recurring, reduced the school days in the year to a number whose smallness Mrs. Grubbling would have indignantly disputed, had it been calculated and set before her; she being one of those not uncommon persons who regard a duty continually evaded as one continually performed, it being necessarily just as much on their minds; till, at last, Herbert had a winter's illness, and in summer it wasn't worth while, and the winter after, baby came, so that of course she couldn't be spared at all; and it seemed little likely now that she ever again would be. But she kept her spelling book, and read over and over what she knew,

the Fair One with Golden Locks; she was Simple Susan going to be May Queen; she dwelt in the old Castle of Rossmore, with the Irish Orphans. The little Gru

nd, as it did in Faith Gartney's, whether