If you should use your soft little hands to do coarse and heavy work, it would not be long before they would get out of shape, and become covered with a thick skin. They might still be very good and dear little hands inside, but they would not so quickly feel the softness of mamma's cheek. All the pleasure of the sense of touch, which you would then find had been great and of many kinds, would be lost to you. So it was with Biddy's heart. She had never had any of the little pleasures, the good times, little hopes and plans, to which all children have a perfect right. Her hard, friendless, cheerless life had made the outside of Biddy's brave little heart tough, just as hard, unfit work would toughen your little hands. But the doll had made a difference to Biddy in every way. She had done all she could for her doll. She loved it. She had made it a dress from a piece of her own. She had been beaten again and again for its sake. Almost more than you would be willing to do for your doll, is it not? But it had done and was doing a thousand times more for Biddy, because Biddy had what the doll had not—life.
Mrs. Brown sometimes forgot to torment Biddy about the doll, and at other times she seemed to feel too stupid and dull to care about it. But she remembered quite often enough, and got away all Biddy's money, and gave Biddy many a scare and heart-ache about it. At last the hard-hearted old woman went too far, as cruel people are pretty sure to do in the end.
About four months had passed since Biddy first found her doll. The warm winds, the green buds, and singing-birds of spring had come, when one night Mrs. Brown took the doll away from Biddy, and told her that unless she could bring her at least two dollars by the close of the week, she should never see it again.
That night Biddy lay awake a long while thinking over what she could do. It was late in the night when she whispered to Charley that she had made up her mind, and wanted to see him somewhere in the morning, and tell him her plan. Charley answered that he would watch for her in the Bowery near a jewelry shop where they had often stopped to look at the pretty things in the window. He said he would be there about half past eight o'clock. After this was settled, Biddy fell asleep.
In the morning the children met as they had agreed, and walked slowly down the Bowery for a block or two, while Biddy told her plan to Charley.
"I can't tell ye all I've been thinkin'," said Biddy; "I feels all stirred up with thinkin', like the soup when Grumpy puts the stick in it. I never slept at all till I thinked it out as how I'd do jist one thing."
"Yis, yis," said Charley, eagerly.
"I'll find a home for Dolly an' me," said Biddy; "I'll begin an' never stop till I gits it."
"Ye'll find a home?" asked Charley. He was a good deal puzzled.
"Yis," said Biddy; "I telled ye my mind's made up. I'll look at every man as I meets, an' I'll ax the first one as I likes the looks of to take me an' try me. Some of 'em'll be wantin' a girl, sure."