So she bade good-by, and courtesied to Mrs. Grubbling and gathered up her little parcels, and went out. Fortunately, Mrs. Grubbling was half stunned, as it was. It is impossible to tell what might have resulted, had she then and there been made cognizant of more. Not to the shorn lamb, alone, always, are sharp winds beneficently tempered. There is a mercy, also, to the miserable wolf.
Glory had one trouble, to-day, that hindered her pure, free and utter enjoyment of what she had to do.
All day she had seen, here and there along the street, little forlorn and ragged ones, straying about aimlessly, as if by any chance, a scrap of Christmas cheer might even fall to them, if only they kept out in the midst of it. There was a distant wonder in their faces, as they met the buyers among the shops, and glanced at the fair, fresh burdens they carried; and around the confectioners' windows they would cluster, sometimes, two or three together, and look; as if one sense could take in what was denied so to another. She knew so well what the feeling of it was! To see the good times going on, and not be in 'em! She longed so to gather them all to herself, and take them home, and make a Christmas for them!
She could only drop the pennies that came to her in change loose into her pocket, and give them, one by one, along the wayside. And she more than once offered a bright quarter (it was in the days when quarters yet were, reader!), when she might have counted out the sum in lesser bits, that so the pocket should be kept supplied the longer.
Down by the —— Railway Station, the streets were dim, and dirty, and cheerless. Inside, the passengers gathered about the stove, where the red coals gleamed cheerful in the already gathering dusk of the winter afternoon. A New York train was going out; and all sorts of people—from the well-to-do, portly gentleman of business, with his good coat buttoned comfortably to his chin, his tickets bought, his wallet lined with bank notes for his journey, and secretly stowed beyond the reach (if there be such a thing) of pickpockets, and the Mishaumok Journal, Evening Edition, damp from the press, unfolded in his fingers, to the care-for-naught, dare-devil little newsboy who had sold it to him, and who now saunters off, varying his monotonous cry with:
"Jour-nal, gentlemen! Eve-nin' 'dition! Georgy out!"
("What's that?" exclaims an inconsiderate.)
"Georgy out! (Little brother o' mine. Seen him anywhere?) Eve-nin' 'dition! Jour-nal, gentleman!" and the shivering little candy girl, threading her way with a silent imploringness among the throng—were bustling up and down, in waiting rooms, and on the platforms, till one would think, assuredly, that the center of all the world's activity, at this moment, lay here; and that everybody not going in this particular express train to New York, must be utterly devoid of any aim or object in life, whatever.
So we do, always, carry our center about with us. A little while ago all the world was buying dolls and tin horses. Horizons shift and ring themselves about us, and we, ourselves, stand always in the middle.