“UPS AND DOWNS.”
A TRUE STORY OF NEW YORK LIFE.
By N. O. LORIMER.
CHAPTER IV.
hen the hard frost had broken, and the streets were full of slush and melting snow, Ada had to spend her five cents going in the Fifth Avenue stage-coach to and from her business, for, even with rubbers on, she had got her feet so wet and her skirts so destroyed that she found that it was in the end cheaper to drive than to walk. The children, too, had found it necessary to drive to school. Marjory had been very troublesome of late; she had been grumbling and repining at her restricted life, saying that she would rather make friends with the girls whom Ada considered vulgar and beneath her, than have such a dull, cheerless time. Ada had noticed that her eccentric old man had not been in the stage-coach for some time past, and she wondered what had become of him. She was sitting waiting for the boarding-house dinner-bell to ring (in the public sitting-room), when the fat lady, who took such an inquisitive interest in her and her little sisters, came in.
“Well, Ada Nicoli,” she said in her rough friendly way, “don’t you wish you were the young lady.”
“What young lady?” said Ada.
The fat lady put the New York Herald down on Ada’s lap.
“Read it,” she said. “It’s the maddest thing you ever heard. The crazy old man whom you’ve often seen in the Fifth Avenue stage-coach, and who ate his bit of bread and cheese every day on the public seat in Madison Square, and looked as poor as any tramp, died a week ago.”