"You funny girl," said her mother. "I hope he understood you and followed your advice, poor little chap."
THE CHRISTMAS GUEST.
FROM A TRUE INCIDENT.
She was a very poor little girl, very poor indeed; often—indeed almost always—hungry, and thinly-clad, and delicate, but yet not altogether miserable. No, far from it, for she had a loving mother who did her poor best for her children. There were three or four of them and Emmy was the eldest. She was only six, but she was looked upon as almost grown-up, for father had died last year, and Emmy had to help mother with "the little ones," as she always called them.
They lived in a single room in one of the poorest and most crowded parts of great London; in a street which was filled with houses of one-room homes like their own. There was much misery and much wickedness, I fear, too, in their neighbourhood; drinking, and swearing, and fighting, as well as hunger, and cold, and sickness. But compared with several years ago, when Emmy's mother herself had been a girl living in much such a home as she now strove "to keep together" for her fatherless babies, compared with that time, as she, and others too, used often to say, "it was a deal better." There was less drinking and bad language; there was less misery. For friends—friends able and earnestly anxious to help—had taken up their abode in the very next street to little Emmy's; the church had been "done up beautiful," and there there was always a welcome and a rest from the troubles and worries at home; and the clergyman, as well as the kind ladies who had come to live among their toiling, struggling brothers and sisters, knew all about everybody and everything, knew who was ill and who was out of work, knew who were "trying to be good" even among the children, knew even the [ tiniest tots by name ], and had always a kind word and smile, however busy and hurried they were.
And, thanks greatly to these kind friends, Emmy's life was not without its pleasures. She loved the infant school on Sundays, she loved the "treats"; once last summer—and Emmy was old enough now to remember last summer well, though it seemed a very long time ago—there had been a treat into the country, a real day in the country, where, for the first time in her life, the child saw grass and trees.
But it was far from summer time now, it was midwinter. Christmas was close at hand, and winter had brought more than its usual troubles to the little family. There were worse things this year than cold and scant food, chapped hands and chilblained feet. Tiny, as they called the baby but one, was very ill with bronchitis, the doctor could not say if she would get better, and sometimes it seemed to the poor mother as if it was hardly to be wished that she should.