I
1. We found the house to which we had been directed by a friend of my guardian, and we went up to the top room. I tapped at the door, and a little shrill voice inside said: "We are locked in; Mrs. Blinder's got the key."
The boy walked up and down.
2. We had been prepared for this by Mrs. Blinder, the shopkeeper below, who had given us the key of the room.
3. I applied the key on hearing this, and opened the door. In a poor room, with a sloping ceiling, and containing very little furniture, was a mite of a boy, some five or six years old, nursing and hushing a heavy child of eighteen months. There was no fire, though the weather was cold; both children were wrapped in some poor shawls and tippets as a substitute. Their clothing was not so warm, however, but that their noses looked red and pinched and their small figures shrunken, as the boy walked up and down, nursing and hushing the child, with its head on his shoulder.
4. "Who has locked you up here alone?" we naturally asked.
"Charley," said the boy, standing still to gaze at us.
"Is Charley your brother?"
"No. She's my sister Charlotte. Father called her Charley."
5. "Where is Charley now?"
"Out a-washing," said the boy, beginning to walk up and down again, and taking the baby's nankeen bonnet much too near the bedstead by trying to gaze at us at the same time.
6. We were looking at one another and at these two children, when there came into the room a very little girl, childish in figure, but shrewd and older looking in the face—pretty faced, too—wearing a womanly sort of bonnet much too large for her and drying her bare arms on a womanly sort of apron. Her fingers were white and wrinkled with washing, and the soapsuds were yet smoking which she wiped off her arms. But for this she might have been a child playing at washing and imitating a poor workingwoman with a quick observation of the truth.
7. She had come running from some place in the neighborhood, and had made all the haste she could. Consequently, though she was very light, she was out of breath and could not speak at first, as she stood panting, and wiping her arms, and looking quietly at us.
8. "Oh, here's Charley!" said the boy.
The child he was nursing stretched forth its arms and cried out to be taken by Charley. The little girl took it in a womanly sort of manner belonging to the apron and the bonnet, and stood looking at us over the burden that clung to her most affectionately.
9. "Is it possible," whispered my guardian, as we put a chair for the little creature and got her to sit down with her load—the boy keeping close to her, holding to her apron—"that this child works for the rest! Look at this! Look at this!"
10. It was a thing to look at. The three children close together, and two of them relying solely on the third, and the third so young and yet with an air of age and steadiness that sat so strangely on the childish figure.