great straw panniers of apples: black apples
with yellow hearts, scarlet veined,--golden pippin apples, that held
the warmth and light longest,--russet apples with a hot blush on their
rough brown skins,--plums shining coldly in their delicate purple
bloom,--peaches with the crimson velvet of their cheeks aglow with the
prisoned heat of a hundred summer days.

I wish with all my heart somebody would paint me Lois and her cart!
Mr. Kitts, the artist in the city then, used to see it going past his
room out by the coal-pits every day, and thought about it seriously.
But he had his grand battle-piece on hand then,--and after that he went
the way of all geniuses, and died down into colourer for a
photographer. He met them, that day, out by the stone quarry, and
touched his hat as he returned Lois's "Good-morning," and took a couple
of great pawpaws from her. She was a woman, you see, and he had some
of the school-master's old-fashioned notions about women. He was a
sickly-looking soul. One day Lois had heard him say that there were
pawpaws on his mother's place in Ohio; so after that she always brought
him some every day. She was one of those people who must give, if it
is nothing better than a Kentucky banana.

After they passed the stone quarry, they left the country behind them,
going down the stubble-covered hills that fenced in the town. Even in
the narrow streets, and through the warehouses, the strong, dewy air
had quite blown down and off the fog and dust. Morning (town morning,
to be sure, but still morning) was shining in the red window-panes, in
the tossing smoke up in the frosty air, in the very glowing faces of
people hurrying from market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes
watering with cold. Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath
hanging about them, were not so out of place, after all. House-maids
left the steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and
beans, gossiping eagerly; the newsboys "Hi-d!" at her in a friendly,
patronizing way; women in rusty black, with sharp, pale faces, hoisted
their baskets, in which usually lay a scraggy bit of flitch, on to the
wheel, their whispered bargaining ending oftenest in a low "Thank ye,
Lois!"--for she sold cheaper to some people than they did in the market.

Lois was Lois in town or country. Some subtile power lay in the
coarse, distorted body, in the pleading child's face, to rouse,
wherever they went, the same curious, kindly