So we walked again, quite up town, almost to the region of pig-pens and cabbage-gardens which is now the Central Park. And after just the first gush of my enthusiasm, Fausta said, very seriously:—
"I must teach you to be grave. You do not know whom you are asking to be your wife. Excepting Mrs. Mason, No. 27 Thirty-fourth Street, sir, there is no one in the world who is of kin to me, and she does not care for me one straw, Felix," she said, almost sadly now. "You call yourself 'Child of the Public' I started when you first said so, for that is just what I am.
"I am twenty-two years old. My father died before I was born. My mother, a poor woman, disliked by his relatives and avoided by them, went to live in Hoboken over there, with me. How she lived, God knows! but it happened that of a strange death she died, I in her arms."
After a pause, the poor girl went on:—
"There was a great military review, an encampment. She was tempted out to see it. Of a sudden by some mistake, a ramrod was fired from a careless soldier's gun, and it pierced her through her heart. I tell you, Felix, it pinned my baby frock into the wound, so that they could not part me from her till it was cut away.
"Of course every one was filled with horror. Nobody claimed poor me, the baby. But the battalion, the Montgomery Battalion, it was, which had, by mischance, killed my mother, adopted me as their child. I was voted 'Fille du Regiment.' They paid an assessment annually, which the colonel expended for me. A kind old woman nursed me."
"She was your Betsy Myers," interrupted I.
"And when I was old enough I was sent into Connecticut, to the best of schools. This lasted till I was sixteen. Fortunately for me, perhaps, the Montgomery Battalion then dissolved. I was finding it hard to answer the colonel's annual letters. I had my living to earn,—it was best I should earn it. I declined a proposal to go out as a missionary. I had no call. I answered one of Miss Beecher's appeals for Western teachers. Most of my life since has been a school-ma'am's. It has had ups and downs. But I have always been proud that the Public was my godfather; and, as you know," she said, "I have trusted the Public well. I have never been lonely, wherever I went. I tried to make myself of use. Where I was of use I found society. The ministers have been kind to me. I always offered my services in the Sunday schools and sewing-rooms. The school committees have been kind to me. They are the Public's high chamberlains for poor girls. I have written for the journals. I won one of Sartain's hundred-dollar prizes—"
"And I another," interrupted I.
"When I was very poor, I won the first prize for an essay on bad boys."