ded down with debt, and the
grocery-man and the butcher after him, and no work, and me and the
children draggin' him down, I can bear anything. If another girl
wants to do it, she must, though I'd like to kill her when I think
of it. I can't do it, because--I think too much of him."

"He might lose his work after he was married, you know."

"Well, I suppose we'd have to run the risk of that; but I'm goin' to
start fair or not at all."

"Well, maybe he'll get work," Fanny said.

"He won't," said Eva. She began to sing "Nancy Lee" over Ellen's
dress.

After breakfast Ellen begged a piece of old brown calico of her
mother. "Why, of course you can have it, child," said her mother;
"but what on earth do you want it for? I was goin' to put it in the
rag-bag."

"I want to make my dolly a dress."

"Why, that ain't fit for your dolly's dress. Only think how queer
that beautiful doll would look in a dress made of that. Why, you
'ain't thought anything but silk and satin was good enough for her."

"I'll give you a piece of my new blue silk to make your doll a
dress," said Eva.

But Ellen persisted. When the doll came out of her closet of
vicarious penance she was arrayed like a very scullion among dolls,
in the remnant of the dress in which Fanny Brewster had done her
house-work all summer.

"There," Ellen told the doll, when her mother did not hear "you look
more like the way you ought to, and you ought to be happy, and not
ever think you wish you had your silk dress on. Think of all the
poor children who never have any silk dresses, or any dresses at
all--nothing except their cloth bodies in the coldest weather. You
ought to be thankful to have this." For all which good advice and
philosophy the little mother of the doll would often look at the
discarded beauty of the wardrobe, with tears in her eyes and fondest
pity in her heart; but she never flinched. When the young man Nahum
Beals came in, as he often did of an evening, and raised his voice
in fierce denunciation against the luxury and extravagance of the
rich, Ellen would listen and consider that he would undoubtedly
approve of what she had done, did he know, and would allow that she
had made her small effort towards righting things.

"Only think what Mr. Beals would say if he saw you in your silk
dress; why, I don't know but he would throw you out of the window,"
she told her doll once.

Ellen did not feel any difference in her way of living after her
fa