"I'll learn you all right. You-all kin stan' hyar by me all day. Jeannie clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz. Whar you come from?"
"Lynn, Massachusetts."
"Did you-all git worried with the train? I only bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days!"
She tells me her simple annals with no question:
"My paw he married ag'in, and me stepmother peard like she didn't care for me; so one day I sez to paw, 'I'm goin' to work in the mills'—an' I lef home all alone and come here." After a little—"When I sayd good-by to my father peard like he didn't care neither. I'm all alone here. I bo'ds with that girl's mother."
I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron. So did Maggie, but mine was from Wanamaker's in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain style, for the child said:
"I suttenly dew think that yere's a awful pretty apron: where'd you git it?"
"Where I came from," I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded brusque. For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet.... (Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are there! Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I move lessons salutary!)
"I didn't mean jest 'xactly wherebouts," she murmurs; "I only meant it warn't from these parts."