“Oh, Princey!” gasped Carolyn May. “I b’lieve he’s making long, curly shavings!”
If there was one thing Carolyn May adored, it was curls. Because her own sunny hair was almost perfectly straight, she thought the very loveliest thing a fairy godmother could do for her was to fit her out with a perfect suit of curls.
There had been a carpenter shop only two blocks from where she lived in Harlem, and she and her friend, Edna Price, had sometimes gone there and begged a few curly shavings with which to bedeck themselves. But they could never get as many shavings as they wanted there, for the man swept them up every day and put them in bags, to be sold for baling.
But here, at this carpenter’s shop, she had seen, only the afternoon before, great heaps of the most beautiful, curly, smelly shavings! She drew nearer, her hand upon Prince’s collar, and stood looking at the old man with the silver-bowed spectacles pushing away at the jack-plane.
Suddenly, Mr. Jedidiah Parlow looked up and saw the wistful, dust-streaked face under the black hat-brim and above the black frock. He stared at her for fully a minute, poising the plane over his work. Then he put it down and came to the door of the shop.
“You’re Hannah Stagg’s little girl, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice Carolyn May thought almost as dry as his shavings.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and sighed. Dear me, he knew who she was right away! There would not be any chance of her getting a suit of long curls.
“You’ve come here to live, have you?” said Mr. Parlow slowly.
“Yes, sir. You see, my papa and mamma were lost at sea—with the Dunraven. It was a mistake, I guess,” sighed the little girl, “for they weren’t fighting anybody. But the Dunraven got in the way of some ships that were fighting, in a place called the Mediterranean Ocean, and the Dunraven was sunk, and only a few folks were saved from it. My papa and mamma weren’t saved.”
“So?” said the carpenter, pushing his big spectacles up to his forehead. “I read about it. Too bad—too mighty bad! I remember Hannah Stagg,” he added, winking his eyes, Carolyn May thought, a good deal as Prince did. “You look like her.”