or Carlotty
was a pickaninny four years old, and blacker than the Ace of Spades! Her
purple calico dress, pink apron, and twenty little woolly braids tied
with bits of yellow ribbon made her the most tropical of butterflies;
and the children, having a strong sense of color and hardly any sense of
humor, were always entirely carried away by her antics.

[Illustration: CARLOTTY GRIGGS "BEING A BUTTERFLY."]

Carlotty had huge feet,--indeed, Carlotty "toed in," for that matter;
but her face shone with delight; her eyes glistened, and so did her
teeth; and when she waved her ebony hands and flitted among the
children, she did it as airily as any real butterfly that ever danced
over a field of clover blossoms.

And if Patsy's joy was great in the play, it was greater still in the
work that came afterward. When Helen gave him a scarlet and gold mat to
weave, his fingers trembled with eagerness; and the expression of his
face caused that impulsive young person to fly to my side and whisper,
"Oh, why should one ever 'want to be an angel' when one can be a
Kindergartner!"

* * * * *

From this time on, Patsy was the first to come in the morning and the
last to leave at night. He took the whole institution under his
guardianship, and had a watchful eye for everybody and everything
belonging to it.

He soon learned the family history of every child in the school, and
those family histories, I assure you, were of an exciting nature; but so
great were Patsy's prudence and his idea of the proprieties that he
never divulged his knowledge till we were alone. Then his tongue would
be loosed, and he would break into his half-childlike, half-ancient and
reflective conversation.

He had a stormy temper, which, however, he was fast learning to control,
and he was not always kind and gentle with his little playfellows; for
he had been raised in a hard school, and the giving and taking of blows
was a natural matter, to him the only feasible manner of settling a
misunderstanding.

His conduct to me, however, was touching in its devotion and perfect
obedience; and from the first hour he was my poor little knight _sans
peur et sans reproche_.

Meanwhile, though not perfect, he was greatly changed for the better. We
had given him a neat little coat and trousers, his hair was short and
smooth, and his great dark eyes shone with unutterable content. He was
never joyous; born under a cloud, he had lived in i