The Portion of Labor

nce Ellen was at the window, and one of the men looked up and saw her, and since his solicitude for the lost child filled his heart with

ut Ellen's size,

he looked something li

well enough," said the

spiritual twilights connected her sleeping and waking hours. She opened her eyes and looked around the room, and remembered how she had run away and how her mother was not there, and she remembered the strange lady with that same odd combination of terror and attraction and docility with which she had regarded her the night before. It was a very cold morning, and there wa

ing-gown of quilted crimson silk which dazzled her eyes, accustomed as she was to morning wrappers of dark-blue cotton at ninety-eight cents apiece; and she was

love and kindness, and tender admiration of herself; and her conviction of its beauty was complete. But at the same time a bitter and piteous jealousy for her mother and home, and all that she had ever loved and believed in, came over her. What right had this strange woman, dressed in a silk dress like that, to be leaning over her in the morning, and looking at her like that-to be leaning over her in the morning instead of her own mother, and looking at her in that way, when she was not her mother? She shrank away towards the oth

n't be afraid. You shall have such a little, white, new-laid egg for your breakfast, and some slices of toast, such a beautiful brown,

suddenly, with an exceedingly bitt

n-stairs in a great cage that shines like gold, and you shall have him for your own, and h

ot her mother, and her revolt of loyalty was subdued for the time. After all, whether we like it or not, love is somewhat o

ere a baby and set her on a white fur rug, into which her feet sank, to her astonishment. Her moth

too, she had always been so petted at home, and through never going to school had not been in contact with other children. Of

tnot in her best parlor. This had been given to her aunt Ellen, who died when she was a young girl, and was to be hers when she grew up. She did not care as much for the egg and toast either as for the griddle-cakes and maple syrup at home. All through breakfast Cynthia talked to her, and in such manner as the child had never heard. That fine voice, full of sweetest modulations and cadences, which used the language with the precision of a musician, was as different from the voices at home with their guttural slurs and maimed terminals as the song of a spring robin from the scream of the parrot which Ellen could hear in some distant room. And what Cynthia said was as different from ordinary conversation to the child as a fairy tale, being interspersed with terms of endearment which her mother and grandmother would have considered high-flown, an

crime was in reality more foreign to her nature than virtue, and her instinct was to return to her narrow and straight way

came of a stiff-necked family on one side at least, and sometimes stiff-neckedness is more pronounced in a child than in an adult, in whom it may be tempered by exp

his beak and claws, and she liked Cynthia's story about him better than the gorgeous actuality of the bird himself. She shrank back from that shrieking splendor, clinging with strong

ished with a wild shriek of laughter, her note of human grief making a curious chord with the bird's of inhuman mirth. "I want my mother!" she panted out, and wept, and would not be comforted. Then Cynthia took her away from the parrot and produced the doll. Then truly did the sentiment of emulative motherhood i

tenance of unflinching infantile grace and amiability and innocence, and her fickle heart

in the cases of the store-dolls, she wondered how their mothers could let them be sold, and mothered by other little girls, however poor they might be. But she never doubted

her arms. "She has no mother but you," said she. "She is yours, but

en a little boy with a doll. The lady seeme

tle girl, and he was just as pretty as a little girl, and

, in a small, gentle voice

eft off his baby curls and his dresses, and stopped playing with her for a year before that

nswer, her own lip quivered and she sobbed out again, even while she hu

he hot-houses and gave her all the flowers she liked to pick, to still that longing cry of hers. Cynthia Lennox had fine hot-houses kept by an old colored man, the husband of her black cook. Her establishment was very small; her one other maid she had sent away early that morning to make a visit with a sick sister in another town. The old colored couple had lived in her famil

ffed the warm, moist, perfumed atmosphere; she followed Cynthia down the long perspective of bloom, then she said again that she wanted her mother; and Cynthia l

She kissed Ellen, and bade her go on with her breakfast and she would return shortly; but before she had quite left the room a man stood unexpectedly in the door-way, a ma

y around at him through her soft golden mist of hair. "What child is that?" he demanded; but Cyn

rill passion: "I cannot, Lyman. I cannot give her up. You don't know what I have su

mad. Think what this means. Why, if people know what you have done, kept this child,

e would not tell me,"

is nothing but a subterfuge. Yo

ked at a paper

know but you will stand in danger of lynching if people ever find this out, that you

up which had been given her, and the pinks which had been brought from the hot-house the day before, which Cynthia had arranged in a vase beside h