done that long ago," she said. "Jerry is always
telling me I've no business to keep it where everybody can look at it
an' ask about her; an' I hadn't, indeed, for it brings up a time I'd
hardly think or talk about unless I had to for some good. I'll put it
away with two or three more I keep for myself; an' Jerry'll be glad of
it, for he hates to think of her, 'most as much as I do.

"Her father and mother? Ah, that's it: if she'd had _them_! But, you
see, her mother was a young thing that wasn't used to roughing it, an'
this Nan only a baby then. They were decent English folks, an' he looked
like a gentleman; but all we know was that she died of ship-fever on the
passage over, an' was buried at sea; an' he had it too, an' came 'most
as nigh dyin', an' just had strength to crawl ashore with Nan in his
arms. He'd a cousin in the Bowery, a woman that kept a little store for
notions, but didn't make any headway on account of two drinkin' sons;
an' he went to her, an' just fell on the floor before he'd half finished
his story. She put him to bed, and, though the sons swore he shouldn't
stay, an' said they'd chuck him out on the sidewalk, she had her way. It
didn't take him long to die, an' he'd a good bit of money that
reconciled them; but when he was gone there was the baby, just walkin'
an' toddlin' into everything, an' would scream if Pete came near her. He
was the oldest, an' he hated her worse than poison, an' about once in so
often he'd swear he'd send her to the orphan asylum or anywhere that
she'd be out of his sight. Jack didn't care one way or another, but the
mother was just bound up in the little thing; an' she was, they said,
just that wonderful-lookin' that people stopped an' stared at her. Her
eyes weren't black, as they look there, but gray, with those long curly
lashes that looked innocent an' baby-like to the very last minute; and
her hair--oh, you never saw such hair! Not bleached out, as they do it
now, to a dead yellow, but a pure gold-color, an' every thread of it
alive. I've taken hold of it many a time to see it curl round my finger,
an' the little rings of it lying round her forehead; an' her face to the
last as pure-lookin' as a pearl--clear an' soft, you know--an', when I
saw her first, with a little color in her cheeks no deeper than the pink
in a pink rose.

"Now, it'll seem to you like a bit out of the _Police Gazette_ or those
horrid story-papers, but, do you know, when she wasn't three Pete c