“But the policeman carried her off, still shrieking, and as her voice died away in the distance, I could still hear ‘Oh don’t! oh let me go!’ and then the crowd scattered, and every body went home; and I went back to bed, and dreamed that the little girl was going to be hung, and that I saved her. Not till the next morning, could I find out what was the cause of the trouble. The little girl’s name was Ann Mahon. Her father and mother were Irish, and lived in a cellar, with a great many people, black and white, who were all very bad and idle. Little Ann had never lived in any other way than this; she was born in a cellar; and had been beaten and starved and abused, till she was not more than half the size of children of her own age. Her father and mother were both drunkards; they were too idle to work for a living, so they sent poor little Ann out into the streets at nine o’clock at night, to beg money; thinking that people would pity a little girl so much for being all alone at that time of night, that they would certainly give her something. But to make sure of her getting it, they told little Ann, when they pinned the thin ragged dirty shawl over her little brown head, that if she sat down on the steps anywhere, and went to sleep, or did not bring some money when she came back, they would whip her, till she was almost dead. So the poor little thing went out, and pattered up and down the cold pavements, with her bare, weary feet, hour after hour, never daring to sit down a moment to rest herself, running up to the gentlemen who were hurrying home, with ‘A penny please sir? a penny please sir?’ Now, a lady would come along, a bright beautiful lady, with a gay cloak, just from the theater or opera, leaning on a gentleman’s arm, her eyes flashing like the diamonds in her bosom; she would hear little Ann’s ‘A penny please,’ as she stepped into her carriage, and gathering up her beautiful clothes in her snowy fingers, lest Ann should soil them, would turn away and pass on, and the gentleman with her, would say, ‘What a pest these beggars are.’ Sometimes some gentlemen who had little girls at home like Ann, would put their hands in their pockets, and give her a penny, and say kindly, ‘Run home, my dear, out of the street,’ but the poor child did not dare to go, till she had more pennies, and so she wandered on.
‘By-and-by little Ann heard the organ under my window; she liked the music, it sounded like kind words to her, and poor Ann had heard so few of those, in her little lifetime; so she drew closer to the crowd to listen still saying, in a low voice, ‘Penny please, penny please,’ to the people who stood there; for she did not dare to stop saying it on account of what her mother had told her, and because it was getting late, and she had as yet only two pennies.
“Presently little Ann felt a heavy hand on her shoulder; she started, and turned round—there was a tall policeman! Little Ann screamed; she knew well enough what a policeman was—poor little girl, she had seen the bad people among whom she was forced to live, hide away from them, many a time; and she had seen them, when the policeman caught them, struggle, and kick, and scream, to keep from being carried to prison; no wonder that little Ann screamed out, ‘Oh, don’t—let me go—oh, don’t!’ as the policeman lifted her up in his arms, just as he would a feather, to carry her off, as she thought, to jail.
“But that was not what the policeman was going to do; he was only going to take her to the watch-house, and keep her safely till morning, and then have her show him where her parents (who sent the poor thing out nights) lived; that he could take them and have them punished for doing it; that was what the policeman was going to do with little Ann; but the poor child did not know that, nor if she had, would it have comforted her any to have been told that her father and mother were to be sent to jail, and she to the almshouse; for bad as they were, they were all she had to care for; and so the poor little friendless thing clung to them. No, Ann did not know where she was going or what for, and the policeman being used to seeing misery, did not take any trouble to explain, or to quiet her, as he should have done; so when poor Ann had screamed till she was all tired out, she fell asleep in the dreary watch-house, with the policemen.
“What do you think that little girl would have given, Tommy, for a nice safe home like this; a clean warm little bed, and a kind mother to undress her every night, and put her into it? Think of that, my boy, when you scowl, and pout, and wish that ‘there never was such a thing as a bed.’”
SOLILOQUY OF OVERGROWN FIFTEEN.
I sprang up, like Jonah’s gourd, in a night; I am as tall as a bean-stalk and as green; I am thick where I ought to be thin, and thin where I should be thick; I am too big to drive hoop, and not old enough to wear one; too tall to let my hair loose on my shoulders, and not old enough to fix it up with a comb; I am too large to wear an apron, and I can’t keep my dress clean without one; I have out-grown tucks, and am not allowed to wear flounces; I have to pay full price in the omnibuses, and yet gentlemen, because of my baby-face never pull the strap for me; I have lost my relish for “Mother Goose,” and am not allowed to read love-stories; old men have done giving me sugarplums, and young men have not begun to give me “kisses;” I have done with gingerbread hearts and nobody offers me the other sort; I have given up playing with “doll-babies,” and am forbidden to think of a husband; if I ask my mother for a “dress-hat,” she says “Pshaw! you are nothing but a child;” if I run or jump in the street, she says, “My dear, you should remember that you are a young lady now.” I say it’s real mean; so there, now, and I don’t care.
A TEMPERANCE STORY.
Charley Colt’s father was a grocer. There was a great sign stuck up on the corner with a sugarloaf painted on either end; and outside the door were hogsheads of “Jamaica brandy,” and “Old Cogniac.” He was not a temperance man of course; temperance was not so much talked about in those days as it is now; it was a matter of course that drunkards went reeling home from such places as Mr. Colt’s, and nobody seemed to think the worse of the man who sold such maddening stuff. Many a poor heart-broken woman turned away her head when the fat, jolly Mr. Colt walked, on Sundays, into the best pew in church, and sat up as straight as if he had not taken the bread out of the mouths of so many widows and their children. Nobody thought the worse of Mr. Colt for taking, for liquor, all the wages which a poor man had been all the week earning, instead of telling the foolish fellow to take it home to his destitute family. Mr. Colt slept just as soundly as if he had not been doing this for years; and the law did not meddle with him for it; and as to that old-fashioned book, the Bible, which says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mr. Colt never troubled himself to wipe the dust from its covers. Mr. Colt had a bright little boy named Charley, of whom he was very fond; he was an only child. Charley spent all his time in the store when he was not in school, listening to the men who came there to drink, as they lounged round the door, or sat on the counter, or perched themselves on top of the barrels of whisky and rum. Sometimes they would ask him questions, to see what queer old-fashioned answers he would make, and then his father would wink with one eye and say “Oh, he’s a case, that boy, he is going to college one of these days, and going to be a gentleman, ain’t you, Charley?” and then the men would set him up on the barrels and give him the sugar and rum in the bottom of their glasses, and then Charley would talk so fast and so loud that you would think he was crazy, and so things went on at the grocer’s till Charley was a big boy, big enough to go to college. Then his father fitted him out with a great many fine clothes, because he said his handsome Charley should be a gentleman, and gave him a purse full of money, and told him to hold up his head, and not let any body tread him down. And Charley opened his bright eyes and shook his thick curls, and said, whoever wanted to get the better of him would have “to get up early in the morning.” And so off he went to college “to be made a gentleman of.”
When Charley got there, he found out that the way to be a gentleman in college was to insult his teachers, break windows, run up great long bills at the tailor’s, the hatter’s, the pastry cook’s, and the eating and drinking saloons.