"Tommy Carter is real good-natured," she said one day. "And he is not one
bit selfish. Don't you know how he gave the best seat to little Eddie
Cooper this morning, and stood off in a corner where he could not see much?
I like Tommy."
The scholars stared. Somehow it had never occurred to them to "like Tommy;" but, when once it had been mentioned, they seemed to wonder that they had not thought of it. Tommy was good-natured and very obliging. Not a day passed in which he did not in some small way prove this. As for his patches, Angela did not seem to notice them at all; and, if she did not, why should anybody? So in a few days a queer thing happened. The boys stopped teasing Tommy, and began in little ways to be kind to him. Some of the older ones, when they happened to have an extra apple or pear, fell into the habit of saying, "Here, want this?" and would toss it to Tommy. And when they discovered that he saved a piece of everything for Sissy, they did not laugh at all, for Angela said, "How nice for him to do that!"
Soon they began to save up bright little things themselves for Sissy—bits of paper, half-worn toys, once a new red ball. None of them realized it, but this really the influence of the new little girl with brown curls.
In that way it came to pass that Tommy lost many of his chances for being a hero; but a new chance was coming.
Tommy lived in a large tenement-house on one of the back streets of San Francisco. Seven other families lived in the same house. One Tuesday evening, Mrs. Carter told the woman who lived across the hall that she had done the hardest day's work of her life, and was so dead tired that she felt as if she would like to go to bed and never get up.
At five o'clock the next morning, she, Sissy, close beside her, and Tommy, in a little cot at the farther end of the room, were all sound asleep. Suddenly the walls of the big tenement-house began to sway from side to side in the strangest manner, and there was at the same second a terrible crashing noise. The kitchen table in the corner tipped over, and the dishes in the corner cupboard slid to the floor and went to pieces. The big wardrobe, which was a bureau and a clothes-closet all in one, moved out into the middle of the room, and the stove fell down. All these things happened so fast, and the earth was full of such strange, wild noises, that for a second nobody knew what was the matter.
Tommy Carter got to his mother's side before the noise was over, but he found that she could not stir; her bed was covered with bricks, and there was a great hole in the wall. Tommy did not know it then, but he understood afterward that the chimney had fallen on his mother's bed.
"Tommy," she gasped, "it is an earthquake! Take Sissy and run."
"But, mother," he cried, "O mother, I cannot leave you!"
"Never mind me, Tommy; take her quick! She is not hurt. Maybe there will be another. Tommy? you take care of Sissy! Run!"