“Ah! there you have me at a disadvantage, husband,” said the lady. “Do you know I don’t believe ten cents could be raised in the whole house?”
And the lady laughed, as if she regarded the circumstance as an excellent joke. The child, taking her cue from the mother, screamed with delight. Then, imitating the sound of a bumble-bee, she made her father start up, afraid he was going to be stung. This put the climax to her merriment, and she threw herself on the sofa in a paroxysm.
“What a little devil it is!” exclaimed Pompilard, proudly smiling on his offspring. “Is it possible that no one in the house has so much as a quarter of a dollar? Where are the girls? Girls!”
His call brought down from up-stairs his two eldest, children of his first wife,—one, Angelica Ireton, a widow, whose perplexity was how to prevent herself from becoming fat, for she was already fair and forty; the other, Melissa (by Netty nicknamed Molasses), a sentimentalist of twenty-five, affianced, since her father’s last financial downfall, to Mr. Cecil Purling, a gentleman five years her senior, who labored under the delusion that he was born to be an author, and who kept on ruining publishers by writing the most ingeniously unsalable books. Angelica had a son with the army in Mexico, and two little girls, Julia and Mary, older than Netty, but over whom she exercised absolute authority by keeping them constantly informed that she was their aunt.
Angelica was found to have in her purse the sum required for the organ-man. Pompilard took it, and started for the door, when a prolonged feline cry made him suppose he had trodden on the kitten. “Poor Puss!” he exclaimed; “where the deuce are you?” He looked under the sofa, and an outburst of impish laughter told him he had been tricked a second time by his little girl.
“That child will be kidnapped yet by the circus people,” said Pompilard, complacently. “Where did she learn all these accomplishments?”
“Of the children in the next house, I believe,” said Mrs. Pompilard; “or else of the sailors on the river, for she is constantly at the water-side watching the vessels, and trying to make pictures of them.”
Pompilard went to the door, paid the organ-grinder, and re-entered the room with an “Extra” which the grateful itinerant had presented to him.
“What have we here?” said Pompilard; and he read from the paper the announcement of a terrible steamboat accident, which had occurred on the night of the Wednesday previous, on the Mississippi.
“This is very surprising,—very surprising indeed,” he exclaimed. “My dear, it appears from—”