as a
namesake."

"Certainly I won't. So bring him right along and we'll do our best for
him."

It was some time before he reappeared, carrying his youngest in his
arms, its cheeks polished and its wet hair turning over in rings, decked
in its chief finery, a blue quilted cloak. The mother came along to hold
her cherub in her lap. She was a long, raw-boned woman, immature in face
under all her crust of care and tan, evidently distressed in her free
waist by the tightness of her calico dress and in her unfenced feet by
shoes.

"What are you going to do with the baby?" inquired Miss Gill kindly as
she encountered this group at right angles on her return from the
post-office.

"Garn with him to the man to git his picter. Come in and see him took,"
invited Mrs. Mallston timidly.

The young woman, ready to seize on any distraction, went in, scarcely
understanding that her bruised ambition reached for healing to such
homely, lowly natures as these.

The artist was glad to see her, and she sat on the locker while
preparations went on. She exchanged amused glances with him when the
other Mallstons flocked to the steps, bellowing in various keys for
their mother, and on their being swung in by one arm and placed in a row
on the opposite locker, she gazed at them in turn, wondering what the
future held out to such lumps of dirt and sombre black eyes.

Mallston set his youngest on the mother's lap and looked at it with
sneaking fondness. The whole tribe seemed equally dear to him, but this
youngest appealed to his strength. Mrs. Mallston was not celebrated as a
tender mother. She went after pails of water and left her children
playing beside the railroad-track; their tattered and ludicrous
appearance bespoke her unskilfulness with the needle; she was said to
have scalded the eldest boy with a skilletful of hot water in which she
had soaked bacon, pouring it out of the window on his head. But she
probably did as well as she knew how, and Mallston did much better. The
photographer watched him go back a dozen times to straighten the baby's
sturdy legs, tap it under the chin with his colossal fore finger, cluck
in the laughing red cavern of his mouth and change the folds of its
quilted cloak with quite a professional air. What were poverty, the
world's neglect, hard labor and circumscribed life to this man? That
muscle which gathered and distributed the streams of his body may have
been to him a heaven in which these five you