Even Mrs. Magwire, the overseer's wife, with whom she lived, had forgotten to hurry or to scold her. What emotions were surging in her young bosom no one could know.
There was something in the cannon's roar that charmed her ear—something suggestive of strength and courage. Within her memory she had known only weakness and fear.
After the yellow scourge of '53, when she was but four years old, she had realized vaguely that strange people with loud voices and red faces had come to be to her in the place of father and mother, that the Magwire babies were heavy to carry, and that their mother had but a poor opinion of a "lazy hulk av a girrl that could not heft a washtub without panting."
Idyl had tried hard to be strong and to please her foster-mother, but there was, somehow, in her life at the Magwires' something that made her great far-away eyes grow larger and her poor little wrists more weak and slender.
She envied the Magwire twins—with all their prickly heat and their calico-blue eyes—when their mother pressed them lovingly to her bosom. She even envied the black babies when their great black mammies crooned them to sleep.
What does it matter, black or white or red, if one is loved?
An embroidered "Darling" upon an old crib-blanket, and a daguerreotype—a slender youth beside a pale, girlish woman, who clasped a big-eyed babe—these were her only tokens of past affection.
There was something within her that responded to the daintiness of the loving stitches in the old blanket—and to a something in the refined faces in the picture. And they had called their wee daughter "Idyl"—a little poem.
Yet she, not understanding, hated this name because of Mrs. Magwire, whose most merciless taunt was, "Sure ye're well named, ye idle dthreamer."
Mrs. Magwire, a well-meaning woman withal, measured her maternal kindnesses to the hungry-hearted orphan beneath her roof in generous bowls of milk and hunks of corn-bread.