“No,” said the child, “but Roy said he was the good Bishop who stays down here with us, and don’t go away frolicking. And now I must go to see Roy. There he is calling his extras at the corner.”
“Well, I never!” said one of the women, as the child skipped away. “She seems to make friends, don’t she? She and that boy are awful fond of each other; and now there ’s this Bishop!”
“Well,” said the other, “Janet is a pretty girl, with her dark eyes, and her hair always braided in one long plait down her back—and even if she is in rags, her hair is always tidy.”
“Her father sells everything that people give her—it ’s a wonder he don’t cut off her hair and sell that. Well, the girl has a white skin, and a pretty mouth, and a straight nose just like her mother’s. She don’t look and she don’t act like as if she was born and raised here among us poor folks.”
“That she don’t; and she ’s such a little mite for her age, with those little hands and feet. You wouldn’t take her to be fourteen, would you, now?”
While the women were talking her over, Janet went to find Roy, who stood at the corner shivering with the cold, with his papers under his arm.
“Hello, Roy!” said she, “see my beautiful stockings! That Bishop gave ’em to me off the tree, and they was full of candy and money!” Coming close to him, she said in a whisper, “Here ’s some for you!” and she took a little paper bag full of candy from under her ragged shawl where she had hidden it.
“Oh, Roy,” she said, “it was the finest tree you ever did see! And the Bishop gave me the stockings his own self, and when he gave them to me he put his hands on my head, and what do you think he said? He said, ‘God bless you, my child! Remember to keep yourself pure and clean to the end of your life.’ And when he was a-saying it, he looked up at a sugar boy with shiny wings that was hanging on the top of the tree.”
The boy and girl parted at the corner, he to sell his papers through the cold and the mire of the slums, and she to go to her poor, wretched home.
She mounted the rickety stairs of an old tenement-house, up to the top floor, where, in one small garret, the whole family lived. In one corner of the room was an old ragged straw mattress, on which the father, mother, and baby slept. The baby was asleep now, the father was drinking in a saloon near by. In another corner was a pile of straw where Janet and her sister Bessie slept; and in yet another, on a heap of rags and paper, lay two pretty little boys, sound asleep, unconscious of the fact that they were cold and hungry. One could see, in spite of rags and dirt, that they were like cherubs, with their sunny curls.