Why Mrs. Tyke desired that the steps and the pavement should be scrubbed upon that cold and dismal December morning cannot be imagined. Probably she herself could not have given a reason for it if she had been asked. The bricks looked very clean and wholesome before the work began, and the marble steps were almost painfully white. Now, the pavement was covered with a film of ice upon which pedestrians slipped and were provoked to anger, and the steps were positively so icy as to be unfit for use.
The voice of Mrs. Tyke gave fresh impetus to the arm of the child, who was just giving a few finishing wipes to the uppermost step. She was a little child, surely not more than eight years of age. As she knelt upon the marble, rather painful prominence was given to a pair of shoes which might once have been the property of Mrs. Tyke herself, but which were now worn, as forlorn and riddled wrecks, upon feet which were stockingless. The thin little legs above the leather ruins were blue with cold, and the tiny arms which wielded the wiping-cloth with accelerated speed were bare and chapped to redness.
If it was an offence to cover a pavement with ice upon such a morning, it was a bitter wrong to compel a little child so poorly clad to perform the work.
Before Jinnie had replaced her cloth in her bucket, Mrs. Tyke appeared in the doorway with anger in her face. She took hold of one of the child’s ears with her coarse fingers and pulled her into the hallway head foremost with as much force as if she had been shot out of a catapult. Then Mrs. Tyke, with a vigorous hand, boxed the ear that she had pulled, cuffed the other ear, impartially, knocking the child against the wall.
“I’ll teach you to mind me when I call you! Pottering and fooling with your work! Now you go right out into the yard and scrub those bricks in a jiffy, or you’ll know how the broom-handle feels.”
Mrs. Tyke was going to have the back-yard scrubbed also. Why Mrs. Tyke did not scrub the four walls of the house, and the roof, and the chimney flues and the fence, and why she did not scrub the cobble-stones in the street, is an impenetrable secret.
Jinnie picked up the bucket, and went staggering through the hall, into the kitchen, with a feeling that her head might at any moment tumble off, as a result of Mrs. Tyke’s blows, and roll upon the floor. She refilled her bucket at the hydrant, and began her work with a vigor that promised to make Mrs. Tyke’s back-yard within a few moments a fit place for skaters.
Just before the work was done, Mrs. Tyke appeared at the window with her bonnet on, and in a severe tone gave Jinnie some directions respecting the preparation of dinner during her absence. Then Mrs. Tyke withdrew, and just as the front door slammed Jinnie saw the head of a child appear over the top of the partition fence, between the yards of Mrs. Tyke and Mrs. Brown.
Young Miss Brown watched Jinnie putting away the scrubbing implements, and when Jinnie drew near to the fence with an apparent purpose to have some conversation, the little Brown said:
“It’ll pretty soon be Christmas, now.”