the two older boys had finished school and begun to vote. They were
thirteen and fourteen, but the school records had them as fifteen and
sixteen, for the interpreter had explained to their father that a man
cannot vote until he is twenty-one.

Daisy was twelve, but she had room in her heart for all her family, and
for a doll besides. This was of rags; and on the way from Castle Garden
to the tenement she had found it, neglected, forsaken--starving,
perhaps--in a gutter. In its single garment, in its woollen hair, and
upon its maculate body the doll carried, perhaps, the germs of typhoid,
of pneumonia, of tetanus, and of consumption; but all night it lay in
the arms of its little mother, and was not permitted to harm her or
hers.

The Obloskis, with the exception of Mrs. Brenda, were a handsome
family--the grandfather, indeed, was an old beauty in his way, with
streaming white hair and beard, and eyes that reminded you of locomotive
headlights seen far off down a dark tunnel; but their good features were
marred by an expression of hardness, of greed, of unsatisfied desire.
And Mr. Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only
natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too
busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to
think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash
the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the
mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as
the skin upon her little hands thickened and grew rough and red, the
expression in her great eyes became more and more luminous, translucent,
and joyous.

Even to a class of people whose standards of beauty differ, perhaps,
from ours, she promised to be very beautiful. She was a
brown-and-crimson beauty, with ocean-blue eyes and teeth dazzling white,
like the snow on mountains when the sun shines. And though she was only
twelve, her name, underlined, was in the note-book of many an ambitious
young man. I knew a young man who was a missionary in that quarter of
the city (indeed, it was through him that this story reached me), an
earnest, Christian, upstanding, and, I am afraid, futile young man, who,
for a while, thought he had fallen in love with her, and talked of
having his aunt adopt her, sending her to school, ladyizing her. He had
a very pretty little romance mapped out. She would develop into an
ornament to any society, he sa