Jaf. Mercy! Kind Heaven has surely endless stores
Hoarded for thee, of blessings yet untasted.
—Otway.
So Lotte Clinton began the world afresh. Her prospects were newer and brighter. Since she had been flung abruptly and rudely upon the hard world, she had not known such true comfort and happiness as she now enjoyed. The death of her parents, within a few days of each other, had left her and her brother—her senior only some fifteen months—utterly destitute. The disinterested charity of a neighbouring humble tradesman, who had known something of the family in better times, not only provided the expenses of the double funeral, but paused not until it had placed the boy in a lawyer’s office, and the girl at a milliner’s, as an apprentice for three years in the house.
In those three years, Lotte had been trained to exist with as few hours nightly sleep as it was possible for her young nature to sustain without actually sinking under it. But she had acquired the whole mystery of cap-makings and some little knowledge of dressmaking.
When the term of her apprenticeship expired, she went through the routine of day work until her skill, and the known power she had of working long after midnight, and rising with the sun, enabled her to ask for, and to obtain, her work at home.
The advantages afforded her by this arrangement were, that she saved the time occupied in passing to and from her place of business, and she was spared exposure to insult on her nightly return to her humble lodging.
When our tale opened, she was occupied in making those pretty blonde, flowered fronts, worn by ladies as the inner adornment of their bonnets. For making up these, she was paid at the rate of sixpence-halfpenny, sevenpence-halfpenny, and for some eight-pence-halfpenny per dozen. At this miserable pay she had to rise with the dawn, and work until past the hour of midnight, to earn even a scanty pittance-Many a fair creature, consulting her mirror, has, with gratified pride, observed the becoming properties of the small and pretty addition to her head-dress; but how very few have reflected that their own efforts to procure it as cheaply as possible have helped to hurry many a poor exhausted careworn sister into the crowded paths of sin, or into a pauper grave!
Lotte was rapid with her needle, and was full of self-sacrifice, that she might be self-dependent. She possessed great powers of endurance, and, to preserve her independence, she taxed those powers to the utmost. No one but herself knew what privations she had undergone. No one but herself could tell of the hardships she had faced, struggled with, without a despairing sigh, and had surmounted—until the cruel circumstances succeeding the fire had ruthlessly dragged from her all hope.
Now her trials and her miseries seemed to have vanished. She had not to work so hard, for she was far better paid, and if her old habit of early rising still adhered to her, she laid her pretty, happy face upon her soft pillow at least an hour before midnight.