"What else could I do? I was shivering with cold myself. Could I leave it out there? No. I took hold of the handle of the basket—which it was a large open clothes basket with a handle at each end, and very useful I have found it ever since to put the siled clothes in—and I began to drag it through the door and through the back room into this very room. But the motion waked the baby up, and it opened the darkest blue eyes I ever had seen in my life, and looked at me as calm and quiet as if it had known me all my life, and then it opened its little rosy lips, and said:
"'Gamma!'
"Yes, my dear Gem, that was what you called me from the first, 'Gamma.' It went straight to my heart, Gem! And why? Because I was sixty years old then, and my hair was as white as it is now, and I never had a baby in the world to call me grandma: all because Tabby and Libby didn't marry as they ought to have done twenty years before that."
"You're always hitting of us in the teeth about that, mother, as if it was our fault. As for me I would have married fast enough if William Simpson hadn't a proved false," snivelled Miss Tabby.
"Bosh! there's as good fish in the sea as ever was got out of it," snapped the old lady.
"It was our fate," said the superstitious Miss Libby.
"You made your own fate," answered the inexorable old lady.
"So you adopted the poor little forsaken child," put in Gem, to stop the altercation between the mother and daughters.
"Yes, Gem, of course. But oh! the day you were given to us was a day of jubilee! While I was lifting you out of that basket, lame leg Joe came in to make the fire. When he saw me with a babe in my arms he let his wood fall, and lifted up his arms and opened his eyes in dumb amazement. And when I told him where I found it, he recovered his speech, and advised me to send it to the alms-house.
"'Joe,' I said, 'if ever you mention alms-houses and babies in the same breath to me again, you and I will have to part."