[CHAPTER I]
THE WINGLESS ANGEL
FROM morning till night, poor Mrs. Blyth was hard at work with her great mangle.
It was a very dismal room; no one could call it anything else. The window was very small, several of the panes patched together with pieces of brown paper, and the dust and the spiders had been very busy trying how much sunshine they could keep from coming into the gloomy little room.
Yet one could hardly blame poor Mrs. Blyth very much, for she had a hard life and plenty to do. A drunken husband, a mangle, and five children! No wonder that she had not time to look after the spiders!
The mangle filled up at least half of the room, and from early morning till late at night it was going backwards and forwards, almost without stopping. When Mrs. Blyth was making dinner ready, Angel turned; and when Angel was eating her dinner with her little brothers and sisters, Mrs. Blyth turned again. And in this way the mangle was almost always going; and old Mrs. Sawyer, lying on her bed next door, would quite have missed the noise it made rolling backwards and forwards, which acted as a kind of lullaby to her the whole week long.
Little Angel was standing by the door with a large clothes-basket in her arms, waiting for it to be filled. She was the eldest of the five children, and she was not quite seven years old. She was very small, and her little figure was a good deal bent with turning the heavy mangle. She had to stand on a stool to turn it, and it made her back ache. But that did not matter,—the mangle must be turned, or they would have no dinner to-morrow.
And now the clothes must be carried home; and they were a very heavy load.
"Is all these for Mrs. Douglas, mother?" said little Angel, when the flannels, and dusters, and towels, and stockings were all piled carefully into the basket.