Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

“The top drawer of the bureau is bank enough for me. The sum is near complete to buy the frame for his leg, and it will be wanted next week when I take Billy to the doctor, for it’s to his own house he shall go, and not to the thing they call the “clink” at the hospital, to be stood up and twisted before a crowd o’ dunce heads.”

So Billy was to go to a doctor. That was good news, and Bird began to take an interest in life again, for Billy, in a single hour had crept quickly into her sensitive, motherly little heart, and with her to love and to serve were one and the same impulse.

Presently two new voices joined the conversation, knives and forks rattled, and amid pauses she heard scraps of conversation muffled by food-filled mouths, and knew that they were talking of her. Jack and Larry had come home and were having supper. Jack, who worked in an office by day, was attending an evening school of type-writing and bookkeeping, while Larry, who was of slight build and whose ambition was to be a jockey and ride races, was kept late on the track where he was serving an apprenticeship as handy man to a well-known trainer.

“Where is she? Let’s have a peek at her. I hope she’s pretty if I’ve got to look at her steady,” said Larry, who prided himself on his eye for beauty, and wore plaid clothes and wonderful pink and green neckties, the colours of the stable to which he was attached, and thought it the finest thing in the world, for jockeys are often as loyal to their racing colours as college men are to theirs.

“She isn’t so handsome but what it’ll keep until morning, and she’s dead asleep by this. Quit yer noise, all of ye; ye’ll wake little Billy, and he’s been that fretful to-day that the rasp of his voice would wear through an iron bar,” Mrs. O’More added, as the three burst into loud laughter over some tale of track happenings that Larry told.

Then the voices dropped to a hum, and then turned to the song of the bees in Mrs. Lane’s hives, and Bird drifted away into that sleep that God sends to make our tired bodies and minds able to live together without quarrelling.

******

Bird slept heavily for many hours, yet to her it seemed only a few minutes when she awoke again, a streak of light shining directly across her face and the same noises coming from every side. This time, however, the light was from the sun, not from the gas, and the noises were fourfold, for there is nothing so varied, penetrating, and stunning as the sound of the awakening of a great city to unaccustomed ears.

For a few moments she lay quite still, gazing about, and trying to realize where she was, and whether awake or asleep, for so many things had happened during the past week, that it all seemed like a bad dream.