“It’s very hard to sew; I seem to find so much to interest me somewhere else, when I should be sewing—birds and clouds out of the window—and fairy stories in the grate fire.”
“Rings always wants to play when it’s sewing time,” chuckled Lois, “and then my needle gets lost. Seems to me Jeanie will have a Christmas present every day in the year.
The doctor rose, swinging Lois to his shoulder, declaring he must go home and prepare for the morrow’s trip to the city, and murmured something about “offering Jeanie his undivided attention every day in the year.”
IV.
MADDIE.
The doctor took an early train to the city and spent the best part of the forenoon trying to find someone who knew anything of the whereabouts of Maddie Morrison. He learned that the grandmother had died some time in August, that she was a quiet old body, keeping much to herself, and no one knew anything of the child. Almost discouraged, while waiting for a car, he asked a big policeman if he could give any information. He remembered “the little red-headed girl, the sunlight making a glory of her hair.” “Yes, they took her to an asylum.” He thought it was the one in B—— Street, and there the doctor found her.
The matron was not at all sure about the doctor’s right to see the child, but bless you, the doctor had no doubts, and was so convincing that after much talking and telephoning a satisfactory arrangement was reached.
Maddie did not seem to be a very great favorite at the asylum. She had aired very decided opinions as to “orphum ’sylums.” From what the doctor could gather, Maddie had somewhere gleaned the idea that she was an individual with the right to live and grow according to the dictates of her sunny-hearted nature.
She had grown restive under the constant surveillance, and in a fit of exasperation she had told the matron she was “tired bein’ chased round. If it wasn’t a woman mad ’cause she had too much to do, marching her round, it was a big girl puttin’ on airs,” “and she wasn’t no roach to be routed out and ’sterm’nated.”
When pressed for an explanation by an irate matron, she had drawn a very vivid picture of the destruction of roaches in the tenement where she had lived, and the “board o’ health man” who had said, “you got to rout ’em out. Keep right after ’em till you ’sterm’nate ’em out.” So “somebody was always shooin’ ’em out o’ one place into another, like you do the orphums here.”
“She really is a very troublesome child,” said the matron; “why, last Thursday an officer came to the door at two o’clock in the morning to say there was a child on the fire escape. He thought she might be walking in her sleep. When I reached there, with my heart in my mouth, I found Maddie, in her night clothing, with the thermometer at zero, calmly looking at the sky, and not one word of explanation can anyone get out of her, except that she wanted to.”