pera porter, for instance, or the clockmaker over the way. But what
a loss the orphan-asylum would have suffered, and the dreary lacking
there would have been in the lives of the children! For there must
have been moments in the lives of the children in that asylum when
they felt, awake, as they felt in their sleep when they dreamed their
mothers were about them.

THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL

She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent
girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of
the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was
put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her
how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by
(good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her
there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward
elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid
found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters
had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And
there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper.
She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into
everything by some one else.

She was known on the boat only as "the little convent girl." Her name,
of course, was registered in the clerk's office, but on a steamboat no
one thinks of consulting the clerk's ledger. It is always the little
widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc. The captain,
who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little _convent_
girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never
raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke
first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the
wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to
have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps
that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured
them--penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.

[Illustration: THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY.]

She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with
stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar
and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her
head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but
that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her
footfalls. Her hair was a