“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” cried Lizzie, as they got nearer to the top of the street. “Something surely has happened. Look, Tom, at the lot of the people, and they are carrying somebody. Oh, Tom, it is Emily, I know and feel sure.”
Yes, it was Emily.
Poor girl! Only the day before, she had returned from school for good. She was going to settle down now, she told everyone of her intimate friends, laughing gleefully. She was going to do her father’s little house-keeping; and poor old dad, as she called him, would in future have many a comfort he had missed since mother died.
And baby, too, would not be so much neglected, and could be taken out every forenoon, after father had gone back to work.
There was a bit of garden, too, behind the humble cottage, with a nice grass plot in the centre; there, in spring and summer, the daisies grew, and the yellow celandines.
Bobby, her infant brother, could roll on the grass when it was dry and fine, while she did the gardening all around. And this would be so delightful, because then she would never want a flower to place on mother’s grave.
So you will observe, dear reader, that it was all beautifully arranged.
Alas! and alas! If I were writing an altogether imaginary story, the somewhat sad and sombre ending to this chapter would be altered. But there is far more of truth in my story than anyone will ever know.
That day then, when Emily took her little brother out in his far from elegant perambulator, she heard the sound of a band. A wild-beast show was stationed on the village green it seemed, and there was a triumphal procession through the streets of the little town. Poor Emily stood aside to see it pass, for, despite the fact that children would be admitted to the great marquee for half-price, this procession was the only part of the show she would see. But she marvelled much at the lordly ungainliness of the elephants; at the queer, old-fashioned visages of the camels, and at the wisdom of the piebald pony, and the wit of the immortal clown who rode him, who had appeared—didn’t the bills tell her so?—before every respectable crowned head in Europe. But she stood agape with astonishment when she saw the beautiful and airily dressed “Lion Queen,” perched high on top of her gilded carriage.