hind 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, her old grandmother died, and was buried; and how a
woman of the village, who had used to buy her dandelions, found a place
for her with a relative of her own, in the ten-mile distant city, who
took Glory to "bring up"--"seeing," as she said, "there was nobody
belonging to her to interfere."

Was there a day, after that, that did not leave its searing impress upon
heart and memory, of the life that was given, in its every young pulse
and breath, to sordid toil for others, and to which it seemed nobody on
earth owed aught of care or service in return?

It was a close little house--one of those houses where they have fried
dinners so often that the smell never gets out in Budd Street--a street
of a single side, wedged in between the back yards of more pretentious
mansions that stood on fair parallel avenues sloping down from a hilltop
to the waterside, that Mrs. Grubbling lived in.

Here Glory McWhirk, from eight years old to nearly fifteen, scoured
knives and brasses, tended doorbell, set tables, washed dishes, and
minded the baby; 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, almost, was herself--who amused, or
contented her? There are humans with whom amusement and content have
nothing to do. What will you? The world must go on.

Glory curled the baby's hair, and made him "look pretty." Mrs. Grubbling
cut her little handmaid's short to save trouble; so that the very
determined yellow locks which, under more favoring circumstances of
place and fortune, might have been trained into lovely golden curls,
stood up continually in their restless reaching after the fairer destiny
that had been meant for them, in the old fuzz-ball fashion; and Glory
grew more and more to justify her name.

Do you think she didn't know what beauty was--this child who never had a
new or pretty garment, but who wore frocks "fadged up" out of old, faded
breadths of her mistress's dresses, and bonnets with brims 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 wasn't th