BY MADGE ELLIOT.
HOW artful the wind was that cold March morning, hiding away every now and then, pretending to be quite gone, only to rush out with a fearful howl at such unexpected moments that Carl was nearly blown off his feet each time.
But he struggled bravely forward, bending his head to the blast, and holding his brimless hat on with one hand, while he carried his battered tin pail in the other.
There was not a gleam of fire in the wretched room he had just left; and Tony and Lena, his little sisters, wrapped in the old piece of carpet that served them for a blanket, were almost crying with hunger and with cold.
They would have cried outright if Carl had not kissed them, and said, “Never mind, young uns—wait till I can give you each a reg’lar bang-up lace hankercher to cry on,—then you may cry as much as you please.”
Father and mother had died within a week of each other, when February’s snows were upon the ground, leaving these three poor children without money and without friends—a bad way for even grown-ups to be left.
So Carl, poor boy, found himself, at ten years of age, the head of a family.
Of course he became a newsboy.