l, coverin' her face with her hands and
cryin' as if her heart was broke.

"'There! there!' says Simeon, runnin' after her, all shook up. He's a
kind-hearted man--especially to nice-lookin' females. 'Don't act so,' he
says. 'Be a good girl. Come right back into the settin' room and tell
me all about it. Me and Cap'n Baker ain't got nerves, and we ain't rich,
neither. You can talk to us. Come, come!'

"She didn't know how to act, seemingly. She was like a dog that's been
kicked so often he's suspicious of a pat on the head. And she was cryin'
and sobbin' so, and askin' our pardon for doin' it, that it took a good
while to get at the real yarn. But we did get it, after a spell.

"It seems that the girl--her whole name was Margaret Sullivan--had
been in this country but a month or so, havin' come from Ireland in a
steamboat to meet the feller who'd kept comp'ny with her over there. His
name was Michael O'Shaughnessy, and he'd been in America for four years
or more, livin' with a cousin in Long Island City. And he'd got a good
job at last, and he sent for her to come on and be married to him.
And when she landed 'twas the cousin that met her. Mike had drawn a
five-thousand-dollar prize in the Mexican lottery a week afore, and
hadn't been seen sence.

"So poor Margaret goes to the cousin's to stay. And she found them poor
as Job's pet chicken, and havin' hardly grub enough aboard to feed the
dozen or so little cousins, let alone free boarders like her. And so,
havin' no money, she goes out one day to an intelligence office where
they deal in help, and puts in a blank askin' for a job as servant girl.
'Twas a swell place, where bigbugs done their tradin', and there she
runs into Cousin Harriet, who was a chronic customer, always out of
servants, owin' to the complications of Archibald and nerves. And
Harriet hires her, because she was pretty and would work for a shavin'
more'n nothin', and carts her right off to Connecticut. And when
Margaret sets out to write for her trunk, and to tell where she is, she
finds she's lost the cousin's address, and can't remember whether it's
Umpty-eighth Street or Tin Can Avenue.

"'And, oh,' says she, 'what SHALL I do? The mistress is that hard to
please, and the child is that wicked till I want to die. And I have no
money and no friends. O Mike! Mike!' she says. 'If you only knew you'd
come to me. For it's a good heart he has, although the five thousand
dollars carried away his head,' s