It smiled as it bent over the guitar, while the little fingers picked their ways in and out among the strings; and it smiled yet more sweetly as she looked up to catch the coppers thrown from the fourth and fifth story, and sky-parlor windows.
Puppet once lived with a man who said that he was her uncle; and she believed him so thoroughly, that she let him box her ears whenever he felt like it, till he died. Since then Puppet had lived almost friendless and alone.
One hot July day Puppet was wandering through the streets of the great city, with her little guitar under her little arm. The city did not seem so great to Puppet as it does to some of the rest of us, because she was born and brought up there.
“O, dear,” sighed Puppet, “what a mean place you are!”
No one had given her a copper since the cool of the morning. People seemed to have a fancy for spending their coppers on soda-water and ice-cream.
“What shall I do?” moaned Puppet. Whatever should she do? Puppet must have coppers, or she could not live.
She sat in a cool, shaded court, close to the busy street; but she couldn’t get away from the heat, and the noise, and the people sighing, like herself, “O dear, O dear!”
“I’ll try once more,” said Puppet, tuning her guitar.
She played “Home, Sweet Home,” with variations. But all the people who heard her were suffering, because their homes in the city were rather hot than sweet. “Home, Sweet Home” could win no pennies from “city folks” in July.
Then Puppet whistled to her guitar accompaniment a little “Bird Waltz,” and whirled on the pavement in time, till I doubt if she herself knew whether the guitar had gone mad, and were waltzing about her, or she were waltzing about the guitar.