l the boys laughed, and Mr. Blake smiled. I
think even the cane would have smiled if it had thought it polite.

"I hope it'll be something pleasant," said Fred Welch.

"So do I," said stumpy little Tommy Bantam.

"So do I, boys," said Mr. Blake, as he turned away; and all the way down
the block Old Ebony kept calling back, "So do I, boys! so do I!"

Mr. Blake and his friend the cane kept on down the street, until they
stood in front of a building that was called "The Yellow Row." It was a
long, two-story frame building, that had once been inhabited by genteel
people. Why they ever built it in that shape, or why they daubed it with
yellow paint, is more than I can tell. But it had gone out of fashion,
and now it was, as the boys expressed it, "seedy." Old hats and old
clothes filled many of the places once filled by glass. Into one room of
this row Mr. Blake entered, saying:

"How are you, Aunt Parm'ly?"

"Howd'y, Mr. Blake, howd'y! I know'd you was a-comin', honey, fer I
hyeard the sound of yer cane afore you come in. I'm mis'able these yer
days, thank you. I'se got a headache, an' a backache, and a toothache in
de boot."

I suppose the poor old colored woman meant to say that she had a
toothache "to boot."

"You see, Mr. Blake, Jane's got a little sumpin to do now, and we can git
bread enough, thank the Lord, but as fer coal, that's the hardest of all.
We has to buy it by the bucketful, and that's mighty high at fifteen
cents a bucket. An' pears like we couldn't never git nothin' ahead on
account of my roomatiz. Where de coal's to come from dis ere winter I
don't know, cep de good Lord sends it down out of the sky; and I reckon
stone-coal don't never come dat dar road."

After some more talk, Mr. Blake went in to see Peter Sitles, the blind
broom-maker.

"I hyeard yer stick, preacher Blake," said Sitles. "That air stick o'
yourn's better'n a whole rigimint of doctors fer the blues. An' I've been
a-havin' on the blues powerful bad, Mr. Blake, these yer last few days. I
remembered what you was a-saying the last time you was here, about
trustin' of the good Lord. But I've had a purty consid'able heartache
under my jacket fer all that. Now, there's that Ben of mine," and here
Sitles pointed to a restless little fellow of nine years old, whose pants
had been patched and pieced until they had more colors than Joseph's
coat. He was barefoot, ragged, and looked hungry, as some poor children
always do. Their minds s