ld,
askant eyes and vaguely smiling mouth, with white locks blowing as
straightly and coarsely as dry swamp grass, who was wont to sit,
huddling sharp little elbows and knees together, even in severe
weather, on a stone by the path. She had come into the world and the
poorhouse by the shunned byway of creation. She had no name. The
younger school-children said, gravely, and believed it, that she had
never had a father; as for her mother, she was only a barely admitted
and shameful necessity, who had come from unknown depths, and died of
a decline, at the town's expense, before the child could walk. She
had nothing save this disgraceful shadow of maternity, her feeble
little body, and her little soul, and a certain half-scared delight
in watching for Jerome and his doles of berries and sassafras. One of
Jerome's dearest dreams was the buying this child a doll like Lucina
Merritt's, with a muslin frock and gay sash and morocco shoes. So
much he thought about it that it fairly seemed to him sometimes, as
he drew near the little thing, that she nursed the doll in her arms.
He wanted to tell her what a beautiful doll she was to have when he
was rich, but he was too awkward and embarrassed before his own kind
impulses. He only bade her, in a rough voice, to hold her hands, and
then dropped into the little pink cup so formed his small votive
offering to childhood and poverty, and was off.

Occasionally Elmira had cookies given her by kind women for whom she
did extra work, and then she saved one for the little creature,
emulating her brother's example. There was one point on the way to
school where Elmira liked to have her brother with her, and used
often to wait for him at the risk of being late. Even when she was
one of the oldest girls in school, almost a young woman, she scurried
fast by this point when alone, and even when Jerome was with her did
not linger. As for Jerome, he had no fear; but during his winters at
the district school the peculiar bent of his mind was strengthened by
the influence of this place.

The poorhouse in the hollow had its barn and out-buildings attached
at right angles, with a cart-path leading thereto from the street;
but at the top of the slope, on the other side of the schoolward
path, stood a large, half-ruinous old barn, used only for storing
surplus hay. The door of this great, gray, swaying structure usually
stood open, and in it, on an old wreck of a wheelbarrow, sat Mindy
Toggs, in fa