Give the bass an awful whang,
And close the whole performance
With a slam—bang—whang!
THE FRECKLE-FACED GIRL.
“Ma’s up stairs changing her dress,” said the freckled-faced little girl, tying her doll’s bonnet strings and casting her eye about for a tidy large enough to serve as a shawl for that double-jointed young person.
“Oh, your mother needn’t dress up for me,” replied the female agent of the missionary society, taking a self-satisfied view of herself in the mirror. “Run up and tell her to come down just as she is in her everyday clothes, and not stand on ceremony.”
“Oh, but she hasn’t got on her everyday clothes. Ma was all dressed up in her new brown silk dress, ’cause she expected Miss Dimmond to-day. Miss Dimmond always comes over here to show off her nice things, and ma doesn’t mean to get left. When ma saw you coming she said, ‘the dickens!’ and I guess she was mad about something. Ma said if you saw her new dress, she’d have to hear all about the poor heathen, who don’t have silk, and you’d ask her for money to buy hymn books to send ’em. Say, do the nigger ladies use hymn-book leaves to do their hair up on and make it frizzy? Ma says she guesses that’s all the good the books do ’em, if they ever get any books. I wish my doll was a heathen.”
“Why, you wicked little girl! what do you want of a heathen doll?” inquired the missionary lady, taking a mental inventory of the new things in the parlor to get material for a homily on worldly extravagance.