of her own age was so proud of
her long raven curls that she was brought to an illness and all her hair
came out. There was a distressing picture of this little girl after a just
Providence had done its work as a depilatory. And after she recovered from
the fever, it seemed, she had cared to do nothing but read the Scriptures
to bed-ridden old ladies--even after a good deal of her hair came in
again--though it didn't curl this time. The only pleasure she ever
experienced thereafter was that, by virtue of her now singularly angelic
character, she was enabled to convert an elderly female Papist--an
achievement the joys of which were problematic, both to Nancy and the
little boy. Certainly, whatever converting a Papist might be, it was
nothing comparable to driving a red-and-green-and-gold wagon in which was
caged the Scourge of the Jungle.

But Nancy could not go with him. He told her so plainly. It was no place
for a girl beyond that hill where they commonly drove caged beasts, and no
one ever so much as thought of Coming to the Feet or washing in the blood
of the Lamb, or writing a good business hand with the first finger of it
pointing out, or anything.

The little girl pleaded, promising to take her new pink silk parasol, her
buff buttoned shoes, a Christmas card with real snow on it, shining like
diamonds, and Fragile, her best doll. The thing was impossible. Then she
wept.

He whistled to Penny, who came barking joyously--a pretender of a dog, if
there ever was one--and they moved off. Weeping after them went Nancy--as
far as the first fence, between two boards of which she put her head and
sobbed with a heavenly bitterness; for to the little boy, pushing sternly
on, her tears afforded that certain thrill of gratified brutality under
conscious rectitude, the capacity for which is among those matters by
which Heaven has set the male of our species apart from the female. The
sensation would have been flawless but for Allan's lack of dignity: from
the top board of the fence he held aloft in either hand a golden orange,
and he chanted in endless inanity:

Chink, Chink Chiraddam!
Don't you wisht you had 'em?
Chink, Chink Chiraddam!
Don't you wisht you had 'em?

Still he was actually and triumphantly off.

And here should be recalled the saying of a certain wise, simple man: "If
our failures are made tragic by courage they are not different from
successes." For it came about that the subsequent dignity