When Bird had counted the “six houses from the butcher’s” and found the archway, which was really the entrance to a dismal alley, her basket was almost empty. She hesitated about taking Billy into such a place, and in fact but for her great desire to give Tessie the flowers, she would have turned back herself. As she looked up and down the street, a policeman passing noticed her hesitation and stopped.
“Sure it’s the plucky girl from Johnny O’More’s beyond that tried to catch the thief,—and what do you be wantin’ here?”
Bird recognized the policeman and explained, and he said, “Ye do right not to be pokin’ in back buildings heedless; it’s not fit fer girls like you, but this same is a dacent place, though poor, and as I’m not on me beat, only passin’ by chance, I’ll go through to the buildin’ with ye, and the kid can stay below with me while ye go up, for stairs isn’t the easiest fer the loikes av him.”
So through they went, the big policeman leading the way, and entering the back building Bird began to grope upward. When the house had stood by itself in the middle of an old garden, the sun had shone through and through it, but now the windows on two sides were closed, and the halls were dark, and the bannister rails half gone.
At the first floor landing she paused a moment. What was that tap, tapping? It came from a small room made by boarding off one end of the broad, old-fashioned hallway. The door was open and a single ray of sun shot across from an oval window that had originally lighted the stairs and was high in the wall.
In the streak of sun was a cobbler’s bench and on it sat a man busily at work fastening a sole to a shoe, so old that it scarcely seemed worth the mending.
Then she went on again and, after knocking at two wrong doors, finally found the right one.
“Come in,” piped a shrill, cheery voice; “I can’t come to open it,” and in Bird went.
“I hoped that you would come to-day,” said the small figure, sitting bolstered up in a wooden rocking-chair with her feet on a box covered with an end of rag carpet, by way of greeting. No introduction was necessary, for the two girls knew each other perfectly well, although their previous acquaintance had merely been by waving rags across the yards.
“My legs haven’t felt as if they had bones in ’em in a week,” Tessie continued, “so’s I couldn’t reach up high enough to wave, and it seemed real lonesome, but I’ve got a new pattern for lace, and there’s a man in the store where Mattie works who says he’ll give me half-a-dollar for every yard I make of it,—what do you think of that?” and she spread out proudly a handsome bit of Irish crocheted lace upon which she was working. It was four inches wide, a combination of clover leaves, and very elaborate, of the kind that is so much sought now and costs many dollars a yard in the shops.