y where David Pimble, his brother and
sister, went to school month after month and year after year. He heard
voices, and, looking up, beheld the little group that were occupying his
thoughts, on the hill-top, laughing and mocking at him as he toiled along
with his bundles of sticks. His cheeks glowed with anger for a moment,
and then grew ashy pale, as he plodded on toward his miserable home.

Dilly Danforth, the poor washerwoman, had seen better days; but the
drunken dissipation of a husband, who was now in his grave, had reduced
her to abject, despairing poverty. Her unfortunate marriage and
persistence in clinging to the man of her choice, and enduring all his
abuses, excited the displeasure of her family, and they cast her from
them to suffer and struggle on as best she might. She knew not as she had
a relative in the world. She surely had no friend, save Willie, her
little boy, with whom she dwelt in the comfortless abode we have briefly
visited.

Alas for the suffering poor! How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing
grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from
their pitiful tales of want and destitution!

CHAPTER II.

"This work-day world, this work-day world,
How it doth plod along!"

Tap, tap, tap, on the back kitchen door of Esq. Pimble's great brick
mansion, and a clattering of plates and tea things within which quite
drowned the timid knock. A second and louder one brought a fat, red-faced
woman with rolled-up sleeves and a dish-towel in hand, to answer the
summons.

"Sakes, Dilly Danforth!" exclaimed she, on beholding the well-known,
faded blanket of the washerwoman; "what brings you here so airly in the
mornin'? If you are after cold victuals, I can tell you you can't have
any, for mistress--"

"I am not come seeking charity," said Dilly, cutting short the woman's
brawling speech; "Mr. Pimble wished me to come and wash for him to day."

"_He_ did?" said the bold-visaged housekeeper, opening her large,
buttermilk-colored eyes with astonishment; "well, for sure!"--and here
she seemed debating some matter in her mind for several moments, her hand
still holding the door in forbidding proximity to poor Mrs. Danforth's
pale, grief-worn face.

"Well, you can come in then, I s'pose," she said, at length, flinging it
open spitefully, and returning to the wiping of her breakfast dishes,
which she sent togeth