Aunt Jimmy's Will

by Mabel Osgood Wright

How could she keep her head above the street level, how remember what her father had taught her?—already the memory of the past was becoming confused. Sometimes she was on the verge of ceasing to try and settling down into a silent drudge, content to take what came, and falling into the habits and commonplace pleasures of the girls of her cousins’ acquaintance with whom she was thrown in the parks and on the stoop and streets. It would have been much easier in some respects,—her aunt would have been better pleased to see her go off with the others, to some noisy if harmless excursion, arrayed in a cheap, flower-wreathed hat and gay waist, shrieking with laughter, and chewing gum, than to see her always neat amid disorderly surroundings and ever willing to do the endless little tasks that her own mismanagement piled up, and Ladybird—Jack’s name for her—strangely enough seemed a term of reproach, not compliment.

At first Bird had hoped that Sunday might bring better things; but no, Sunday in the quiet, peaceful, Protestant sense that Bird understood it,—there was none. The family straggled to early mass one by one, for Mrs. O’More and her sons were Romanists, though O’More was not, being from the north of Ireland, and the rest of the day was spent by the men either lying in bed and smoking, or standing in groups about the street.

In these hard days little Billy was Bird’s only ray of light. The two, being of equally sensitive natures, clung together, and the child was so happy in his new-found friend and ceased his incessant fretting whenever he was with her, that Mrs. O’More at last gave him completely to Bird’s charge with a sigh of relief, for her youngest child was as much a puzzle to her as her niece, and she felt that he also was of a different breed, as it were, and it annoyed her.

All the fierce scorching summer days Bird and Billy wandered about together, sometimes going over to Madison Square, sometimes riding in the trolley to Central Park, but more often down to the Battery where the air tasted salt and good, where the wonderful fishes lived in the round house and the big ships went past out to that unknown sea of which Bird was so fond of telling Billy stories.

Bird, too, soon learned to find her way about, for six-year-old Billy had all the New York gamin’s knowledge of his whereabouts coupled with a cripple’s acute senses. He hopped along with his crutch quite well, and many a lesson in human nature and life did Bird learn these days in the treeless streets of poorer New York.

After a time she found that her uncle had seemed to forget his hatred of anything like drawing or painting, so one day she ventured to buy a good-sized pad and pencil, and then watching Bird “make pictures” became Billy’s great joy, while she to her surprise found that she could draw other things besides flowers.

Oftentimes the children would go down to sit on the steps and watch the horses from the great sales stable being exercised up and down the street. Bird tried to draw these too, and one day succeeded so well that her uncle, passing in at the door, stopped and looked down, and then said, “Bully! any one would know it for a horse, sure!” After that she worked at every odd minute.

She loved horses dearly, but she and Billy were forbidden to go into the stables, which were almost underneath the flat, and Bird really had no wish to, for the men there were so rough and there was so much noise and confusion; but a few doors away was a fire-engine house where lived three great, gentle, gray horses that ran abreast, and had soft noses that quivered responsively when they saw their driver even in the distance. Bird made friends with these, taking them bits of bread or green stuff, until the firemen came to expect the daily visit and “Bird” and “Billy” became familiar names in the engine-house; and there was a little dog there that ran with the engine and reminded her of Twinkle.

Dan was the heaviest of the three horses and Bird’s favourite, and one day, after many attempts, seated on the stoop of the next house, she succeeded in drawing a small head of him that was really a good likeness, at least so the firemen thought, for they put it in a frame and hung it in the engine-house, and the next day big Dave Murray, Dan’s driver, gave her a small box of paints “with the boys’ compliments.”

Ah, if the big, bluff fellow only knew what the gift meant to poor little Ladybird struggling not to forget and to still keep the heavenly vision in sight.