What becomes of her finally, I don’t know. I am altogether too soft-hearted to stay any length of time where such things are to be seen every hour.
IN A BOG VILLAGE.
A pathetic little scene took place in the widow’s loft, which illustrates something of Irish character. As I said the husband and father was lying upon his wretched pallet, dying of consumption. The youngest but one of the children was the most beautiful child I have ever seen, a sweet little fairy, with long curly, blonde hair and black eyes, built from the ground up, and with a face that a painter would walk miles to sketch. She was a delicious little dream, a dainty bit of humanity. True, she had nothing but rags upon her delightful little figure, and true it was that her sweet little face was smeared with dirt, and her little hands were as grimy as grimy could be, and her little shapely bare legs were very red and somewhat pimply. But why not? Clothes cannot be had for the children when the father works for ten pence a day and is sick half the time, and nickel-plated bath-tubs and scented soap are not to be expected in the top of a cabin in which you cannot stand upright; and how can a child’s face be kept clean where there is no chimney, and where the room is so thick with peat smoke that you may almost cut it with a knife, and a child that never had a pair of shoes and stockings could hardly be expected to have white legs and feet. The cold prevents that.
In our party was an American gentleman, who was blessed with an abundance of boys, but no girls, and he and his wife had been contemplating the adoption of a girl. Here was an opportunity to secure not only a girl, but just the kind of a girl that he would have given half his estate to be the father of. And so he opened negotiations.
An Irishman who knew him, explained to the father and mother that the gentleman was a man of means, that his wife was an excellent, good woman, and that the child would be adopted regularly under the laws of the State in which he lived, and would be educated, and would rank equally with his own children in the matter of inheritance, and all that. In short, Norah would be reared a lady.