Bertha Weisser's wish

BERTHA WEISSER’S WISH.
BERTHA’S HOME.
M. L. B.
“Lord have mercy upon us, and write all thy laws in our hearts we beseech Thee.—”
BOSTON: E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY. NEW YORK: HURD AND HOUGHTON. 1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by E. P. Dutton and Company, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON.
BERTHA WEISSER’S WISH.
It was a dreary, wet October day, and drawing towards the twilight. The dull leaden-looking sky, the wet slippery pavements, the chilly, cross, uncomfortable passengers, gave to even the brightest and most cheerful streets of the great city a very dismal look; and, as for the meaner ones, with their rows of dreary little shops and tumble-down houses, their reeking gutters and dripping wayfarers, they were utterly forlorn.
In one of the meanest of these forlorn streets, in the back attic of one of these tumble-down houses, a little girl sat looking out at the window. It was not a pleasant prospect in the brightest of weather, that little crowded court, upon which everybody’s back-door opened, and where everybody’s rubbish was collected; but the child was not looking at the court. Neither did she seem to be looking at the sky, though the little pale face was turned wistfully upward; she rather seemed to be thinking intently upon something which occupied all her mind, and shut out for the moment the dreary court below, the dismal sky above, and even the poor little room around her.
A very poor little room it was, indeed,—its only furniture being a ragged, ill-made bed, a rickety stand, two broken chairs, and an old painted chest, near which a rusty stovepipe came up through the floor and passed out again at the low roof. But all the room was brightened somehow by a group of four merry, rosy children, who sat upon this chest, their little bare legs dangling, and their damp garments steaming in the heat, laughing and chattering together in a queer mixture of German and English, which none but an emigrant’s child could understand.