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Page 43
"I had some boarders last summer," she explained, "and, when they went
away, they left these things and said I might put them into the
home-mission box. But I was sick when they sent it off this winter; and,
if you ain't a home mission, then I never saw one. You put 'em on. I guess
they'll fit. They may be a mite large, but she was about your size. I
guess your clothes are about wore out; so you jest leave 'em here fer the
next one, and use these. There's a couple of extra shirt-waists you can
put in a bundle for a change. I guess folks won't dare fool with you if
you have some clean, nice clothes on."
Elizabeth looked at her gratefully, and wrote her down in the list of
saints with the woman who read the fourteenth chapter of John. The old
lady had neglected to mention that from her own meagre wardrobe she had
supplied some under-garments, which were not included in those the
boarders had left.
Bathed and clothed in clean, sweet garments, with a white shirt-waist and
a dark-blue serge skirt and coat, Elizabeth looked a different girl. She
surveyed herself in the little glass over the box-washstand and wondered.
All at once vanity was born within her, and an ambition to be always thus
clothed, with a horrible remembrance of the woman of the day before, who
had promised to show her how to earn some pretty clothes. It flashed
across her mind that pretty clothes might be a snare. Perhaps they had
been to those girls she had seen in that house.
With much good advice and kindly blessings from the old lady, Elizabeth
fared forth upon her journey once more, sadly wise in the wisdom of the
world, and less sweetly credulous than she had been, but better fitted to
fight her way.
The story of her journey from Chicago to Philadelphia would fill a volume
if it were written, but it might pall upon the reader from the very
variety of its experiences. It was made slowly and painfully, with many
haltings and much lessening of the scanty store of money that had seemed
so much when she received it in the wilderness. The horse went lame, and
had to be watched over and petted, and finally, by the advice of a kindly
farmer, taken to a veterinary surgeon, who doctored him for a week before
he finally said it was safe to let him hobble on again. After that the
girl was more careful of the horse. If he should die, what would she do?
One dismal morning, late in November, Elizabeth, wearing the old overcoat
to keep her from freezing, rode into Philadelphia.
Armed with instructions from the old lady in Chicago, she rode boldly up
to a policeman, and showed him the address of the grandmother to whom she
had decided to go first, her mother's mother. He sent her on in the right
direction, and in due time with the help of other policemen she reached
the right number on Flora Street.
It was a narrow street, banked on either side by small, narrow brick
houses of the older type. Here and there gleamed out a scrap of a white
marble door-step, but most of the houses were approached by steps of dull
stone or of painted wood. There was a dejected and dreary air about the
place. The street was swarming with children in various stages of the
soiled condition.
Elizabeth timidly knocked at the door after being assured by the
interested urchins who surrounded her that Mrs. Brady really lived there,
and had not moved away or anything. It did not seem wonderful to the girl,
who had lived her life thus far in a mountain shack, to find her
grandmother still in the place from which she had written fifteen years
before. She did not yet know what a floating population most cities
contain.
Mrs. Brady was washing when the knock sounded through the house. She was a
broad woman, with a face on which the cares and sorrows of the years had
left a not too heavy impress. She still enjoyed life, oven though a good
part of it was spent at the wash-tub, washing other people's fine clothes.
She had some fine ones of her own up-stairs in her clothes-press; and,
when she went out, it was in shiny satin, with a bonnet bobbing with jet
and a red rose, though of late years, strictly speaking, the bonnet had
become a hat again, and Mrs. Brady was in style with the other old ladies.
The perspiration was in little beads on her forehead and trickling down
the creases in her well-cushioned neck toward her ample bosom. Her gray
hair was neatly combed, and her calico wrapper was open at the throat even
on this cold day. She wiped on her apron the soap-suds from her plump arms
steaming pink from the hot suds, and went to the door.
She looked with disfavor upon the peculiar person on the door-step attired
in a man's overcoat. She was prepared to refuse the demands of the
Salvation Army for a nickel for Christmas dinners; or to silence the
banana-man, or the fish-man, or the man with shoe-strings and pins and
pencils for sale; or to send the photograph-agent on his way; yes, even
the man who sold albums for post-cards. She had no time to bother with
anybody this morning.
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