Davy slid off the trunk in silent disapproval when the writing material was brought out, and the girls began their letters. The scratching of the pens across the paper and the dismal dripping of the rain was too monotonous for him, and he felt forced to go below in search of livelier companionship.
CHAPTER VI.
MOLLY'S STORY.
They had been writing a long time, when the Little Colonel looked up with a mischievous smile. "Joyce will think that this is a wondahful place," she said. "I've told her all about my bein' chased by a Barley-bright witch, and how ugly she was, and what Davy said about her goin' through keyholes. It sounds so real when I read it ovah that I could half-way make myself believe that she is one. I'm goin' to slip across into her room now, and see if I can't find the broomstick that she rides around on at night. If there'd just be a black cat sittin' on her pillow, I could almost believe what Davy said about her hoodoo word. Wouldn't she be mad if she knew what was in this letter? I told Joyce how mean she'd acted about the fishin'-worms too, and how she's scowled at us evah since we came."
Betty looked up with a preoccupied smile, for she had long ago finished her letter to Eugenia and was busy with some verses that she was trying to write about the rain. The rhymes were falling into place almost as easily and musically as the rain-drops tinkling down the eaves, and her face was flushed with the pleasure of it. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she did not understand what Lloyd was saying, and smiled a reply without the faintest idea of what it was that she proposed to do.
Lloyd laid down her pen, and, tiptoeing across the narrow passage that divided Betty's room from Molly's, opened the door and looked in. She had thought that the parlour bedroom down-stairs was queer, and that Betty's room was pitifully bare and common, but such cheerlessness as this she had certainly never seen before, and scarcely imagined.
It was an attic-like room over the kitchen, with such a low sloping ceiling that she could touch it with her hand, except when she stood in the middle of the room. There was a rough, unpainted floor, a cot, a dry-goods box covered with newspaper, on which stood a tin basin and a broken-nosed water-pitcher. Some nails, driven along the wall, held a row of clothes, and a chair with both rockers broken off was propped against the wall. Lloyd looked around her with a shiver. The only bright spot in the room was a bunch of golden-rod in a bottle, and the only picture, a page torn from an illustrated newspaper, and pinned to the wall.
Wondering what kind of a picture such a creature as the Barley-bright witch would choose to decorate her room, Lloyd walked across to examine it. It was the front page from an old Harper's Weekly. The date caught her eye first: December 25, 1897. And then she found herself looking into a room still more pitiful than the one in which she stood, for the pictured room was part of an old New York tenement, and sobbing in the corner was a ragged, half-starved little waif, heartbroken because Santa Claus had passed her by, and she had found an empty stocking on Christmas morning.