her a life of rough and unremitting work to
look to for by and by.
When Glory came into this world where wants begin with the first breath,
and go on thickening around us, and pressing upon us until the last one
is supplied to us--a grave--she wanted, first of all, a name.
"Sure what'll I call the baby?" said the proud young mother to the
ladies from the white corner house, where she had served four faithful
years of her maidenhood, and who came down at once with comforts and
congratulations. "They've sint for the praist, an' I've niver bethought
of a name. I made so certain 'twould be a boy!"
"What a funny bit of a thing it is!" cried the younger of the two
visitors, turning back the bedclothes a little from the tiny, red,
puckered face, with short, sandy-colored hair standing up about the
temples like a fuzz ball.
"I'd call her Glory. There's a halo round her head like the saints in
the pictures."
"Sure, that's jist like yersilf, Miss Mattie!" exclaimed Rosa, with a
faint, merry little laugh. "An' quare enough, I knew a lady once't of
the very name, in the ould country. Miss Gloriana O'Dowd she was; an'
the beauty o' County Kerry. My Lady Kinawley, she came to be. 'Deed, but
I'd like to do it, for the ould times, an' for you thinkin' of it! I'll
ask Peter, anyhow!"
And so Glory got her name; and Mattie Hyde, who gave her that, gave her
many another thing that was no less a giving to the mother also, before
she was two years old. Then Mrs. Hyde and the young lady, having first
let the corner house, went away to Europe to stay for years; and when a
box of tokens from the far, foreign lands came back to Stonebury a while
after, there was a grand shawl for Rosa, and a pretty braided frock for
the baby, and a rosary that Glory keeps to this hour, that had been
blessed by the Pope. That was the last. Mattie and her mother sailed out
upon the Mediterranean one day from the bright coast of France for a far
eastern port, to see the Holy Land. God's Holy Land they did see,
though they never touched those Syrian shores, or climbed the hills
about Jerusalem.
Glory remembered--for the most part dimly, for some special points
distinctly--her child life of three years in Stonebury poorhouse. How
her grandmother and an old countrywoman from the same county "at home"
sat knitting and crooning together in a sunny corner of the common room
in winter, or out under the stoop in summer; how she rolled down the
green bank be
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