The events of the day march through my tired brain; so tired! so tired! and just a bit discouraged and sad too. Had I been patient enough with the children? Had I forgiven cheerfully enough the seventy times seven sins of omission and commission? Had I poured out the love—bountiful, disinterested, long-suffering—of which God shows us the measure and fullness? Had I—But the sun dropped lower and lower behind the dull brown hills, and exhausted nature found a momentary forgetfulness in sleep.
CHAPTER II.
PATSY COMES TO CALL.
"When a'ither bairnies are hushed to their hame
By aunty, or cousin, or frecky grand-dame,
Wha stands last and lanely, an' naebody carin'?
'Tis the puir doited loonie,—the mitherless bairn!"
uddenly I was awakened by a subdued and apologetic cough. Starting from my nap, I sat bolt upright in astonishment, for quietly ensconced in a small red chair by my table, and sitting still as a mouse, was the weirdest apparition ever seen in human form. A boy, seeming—how many years old shall I say? for in some ways he might have been a century old when he was born—looking, in fact, as if he had never been young, and would never grow older. He had a shrunken, somewhat deformed body, a curious, melancholy face, and such a head of dust-colored hair that he might have been shocked for a door-mat. The sole redeemers of the countenance were two big, pathetic, soft dark eyes, so appealing that one could hardly meet their glance without feeling instinctively in one's pocket for a biscuit or a ten-cent piece. But such a face! He had apparently made an attempt at a toilet without the aid of a mirror, for there was a clean circle like a race-track round his nose, which member reared its crest, untouched and grimy, from the centre, like a sort of judge's stand, while the dusky rim outside represented the space for audience seats.
I gazed at this astonishing diagram of a countenance for a minute, spellbound, thinking it resembled nothing so much as a geological map, marked with coal deposits. And as for his clothes, his jacket was ragged and arbitrarily docked at the waist, while one of his trousers-legs was slit up at the side, and flapped hither and thither when he moved, like a lug-sail in a calm.
"Well, sir," said I at length, waking up to my duties as hostess, "did you come to see me?"