imaginary masses of curls, was truly
indescribable, and such as I could not begin to make you understand.

"Half-witted monkey!" Mrs. Grubbling would ejaculate, contemptuously,
seeing, with what she conceived marvelous penetration, the half of her
little servant's thought, and so pronouncing from her own half wit. Then
the great shears came out, and the instinct of grace and beauty in the
child was pitilessly outraged, and her soul mutilated, as it were, in
every clip of the inexorable shears.

She was always glad--poor Glory--when the springtime came. She took
Bubby and Baby down to the Common, of a May Day, to see the processions
and the paper-crowned queens; and stood there in her stained and
drabbled dress, with the big year-and-a-half-old baby in her arms, and
so quite at the mercy of Master Herbert Clarence, who defiantly skipped
oft down the avenues, and almost out of her sight--she looking after him
in helpless dismay, lest he should get a splash or a tumble, or be
altogether lost; and then what would the mistress say? Standing there
so--the troops of children in their holiday trim passing close beside
her--her young heart turned bitter for a moment, as it sometimes would;
and her one utterance of all that swelled her martyr soul broke forth:

"Laws a me! Sech lots of good times in the world, and I ain't in 'em!"

Yet, that afternoon, when Mrs. Grubbling went out shopping, and left her
to her own devices with the children, how jubilantly she trained the
battered chairs in line, and put herself at the head, with Bubby's
scarlet tippet wreathed about her upstart locks, and made a May Day!

I say, she had the soul and essence of the very life she seemed to miss.

There were shabby children's books about the Grubbling domicile, that
had been the older child's--Cornelia's--and had descended to Master
Herbert, while yet his only pastime in them was to scrawl them full of
pencil marks, and tear them into tatters. These, one by one, Glory
rescued, and hid away, and fed upon, piecemeal, in secret. She could
read, at least--this poor, denied unfortunate. Peter McWhirk had taught
his child her letters in happy, humble Sundays and holidays long ago;
and Mrs. Grubbling had begun by sending her to a primary school for a
while, irregularly, when she could be spared; and when she hadn't just
torn her frock, or worn out her shoes, or it didn't rain, or she hadn't
been sent of an errand and come back too late--which reasons,