reater difficulties every day, but she was too sensitive not to be
aware of disturbances which were not in direct contact with herself.
She never forgot what she had overheard that night Lloyd's had shut
down; it was always like a blot upon the face of her happy
consciousness of life. She often overheard, as then, those loud,
dissenting voices of her father and his friends in the sitting-room,
after she had gone to bed; and then, too, Abby Atkins, who was not
spared any knowledge of hardship, told her a good deal. "It's awful
the way them rich folks treat us," said Abby Atkins. "They own the
shops and everything, and take all the money, and let our folks do
all the work. It's awful. But then," continued Abby Atkins,
comfortingly, "your father has got money saved in the bank, and he
owns his house, so you can get along if he don't have work. My
father 'ain't got any, and he's got the old-fashioned consumption,
and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine. Then mother's
sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine. We have to have more
medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or
cake, and it's all the fault of them rich folks." Abby Atkins wound
up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.

That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented
with some cookies, which she did not eat.

"Why don't you eat them?" Mrs. Zelotes asked.

"Can I have them to do just what I want to with?" asked Ellen.

"What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it?" Ellen
blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated
generosity.

"What do you want to do with them except eat them?" her grandmother
asked, severely.

"Abby Atkins don't have any cookies 'cause her father's out of
work," said Ellen, abashedly.

"Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies?"

"No, ma'am."

"You can do jest what you are a mind to with 'em," Mrs. Zelotes
said, abruptly.

Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a
little glass of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went
home, but the truth was, that Mrs. Zelotes thought the child so
angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved
to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought
her too good to live.

The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face
stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and
Ellen had to