"

"Did you see my boy?"

There was a tremulousness in her voice and an agitation in her manner
which disclosed the emotion she strove in vain to conceal. For only the
day before Bill Jones had informed her that Shocky would be bound out on
Saturday, and that she would find that goin' agin him warn't a payin'
business, so much as some others he mout mention.

Ralph told her about Shocky's safety. _I_ shall not write down the
conversation here. Critics would say that it was an overwrought scene.
As if all the world were as cold as they! All I can tell is that this
refined woman had all she could do to control herself in her eagerness
to get out of her prison-house, away from the blasphemies of Mowley,
away from the insults of Jones, away from the sights and sounds and
smells of the place, and, above all, her eagerness to fly to the little
shocky-head from whom she had been banished for two years. It seemed to
her that she could gladly die now, if she could die with that flaxen
head upon her bosom.

And so, in spite of the opposition of Bill Jones's son, who threatened
her with every sort of evil if she left, Ralph wrapped Mrs. Thomson's
blue drilling in Nancy Sawyer's shawl, and bore the feeble woman off to
Lewisburg. And as they drove away, a sad, childlike voice cried from the
gratings of the upper window, "Good-by! good-by!" Ralph turned and saw
that it was Phil, poor Phil, for whom there was no deliverance[25]. And
all the way back Ralph pronounced mental maledictions on the Dorcas
Society, not for sending garments to the Five Points or the South Sea
Islands, whichever it was, but for being so blind to the sorrow and
poverty within its reach. He did not know, for he had not read the
reports of the Boards of State Charities, that nearly all alms-houses
are very much like this, and that the State of New York is not better in
this regard than Indiana. And he did not know that it is true in almost
all other counties, as it was in his own, that "Christian" people do not
think enough of Christ to look for him in these lazar-houses.

And while Ralph denounced the Dorcas Society, the eager, hungry heart of
the mother ran, flew toward the little white-headed boy.

No, I can not do it; I can not tell you about that meeting. I am sure
that Miss Nancy Sawyer's tea tasted exceedingly good to the pauper, who
had known nothing but cold water for years, and that the bread and
butter were delicious to a palate that had eaten po