But Matty did not regard it; and she went on and said, "Look at my face, Miss Clementina; it's very horrid and ugly, I know, and I don't wonder as Nurse calls me rubbish, and hates to see me in her nice nursery. Many can't help feeling like that. Do you know how this was done?"
"No. I suppose small-pox; but it's not like that, for your face is all cut to pieces. I don't know how it was done."
"It was done by the dreadful agony of fire. When I was but a little creature, living, O Miss! in such a place—five families of there were in one low, dark, nasty room, and, O Miss! it was like the bad place, indeed it was—such swearing and blasphemy when the men come home drunk, and worse, worse, when the women did so too! Such quarrelling, and fighting, and cursing, and abusing—and the poor children, knocked about at such times anyhow. But my mother never got drunk. She was a poor feeble creature, and mostly sat at home all day crooning, as they call it, by the fire—for they kept a good big fire in winter in the room. And then, when father come home he was generally very bad in liquor, and seeking a quarrel with anything—for something he must have to quarrel with. Well! One evening—O! I shall never forget it—a cold, sleety, winter day it was, and the wind rushing up our court, and the snow falling thick, and the blackened drops, and great lumps of snow coming splashing down, and the foul water oozing in under the doorsill, and all such a mess; and the poor, tired, or half-drunk creatures coming in splashed and dripping, and quarrelling for the nighest places to the fire, and swearing all the time to make one's hair stand on end; and father coming in, all wet and bedabbled, and his hat stuck at the top of his head, and his cheeks red, and his eyes staring, though he was chattering with the cold. Mother was at her place by the fire, and he comes up in a rage, like, to turn her out; and she sitting sulky and wouldn't move; and then there was a quarrel; and he begun to beat her, and she begun to shriek out and cry, and the women to scream and screech. O Miss! in the scuffle—I was but a little thing—somebody knocks me right into the fire, and my frock was all in a blaze. It was but a moment, but it seemed to me such a time!—all in a blaze of fire! And I remember nothing more of it, hardly, but a great noise, and pouring water over me, and running this way and that. When I come to myself, where was I?"
Ella turned from her bird, and her attention seemed riveted upon the story. She forgot her pride and her insolence in the pleasure of listening. Clementina seemed hardly to breathe.
"It was very bad being burned," she said, at last.
"Horrible, Miss!"
"Go on," cried Ella, impatiently; "what became of you?"
"When I got out of my daze—for I believe it was some time before I came to myself—I was lying on father's knee, and he had made a cradle for me, like, of his great strong arms: and his head was bent down, and he was a looking at me, and great big hot scalding tears were dropping fast upon my poor face.
"'My poor—poor little woman,' I heard him say."
"Then—for my eyes had escaped—I was aware that there was a beautiful young lady—at least, I thought her more beautiful than the angels of heaven—standing on the other side of me, right opposite my father, and doing something to my poor arms."