showed walls of shimmering whitewashed purity and unpainted
oaken stairs scoured white as a bone. "Old Gum Heels" stopped here, and
was beginning to give me directions for finding the matron's room on the
floor above, when a door at the back opened and a very little girl
appeared with a very large pitcher of hot water, which she held tight in
her arms as though it were a doll, jiggling at every step a little of
the contents upon the floor.

"Julia, take this girl along with you to Mrs. Pitbladder's room, and
tell her that she wishes to make arrangements about board and lodging."
And then to me: "Mrs. Pitbladder is the matron. You will pay your money
to her, and she will tell you the rules and regulations for
inmates.--And then, Julia, hurry back to the kitchen; I'll need you
right away."

"Yes, ma'am," replied the child, timidly, with a shy glance at me as she
proceeded laboriously up the stairs. At the landing she stopped to draw
breath, putting the pitcher upon the floor and relaxing her thin little
arms. She was such a mite of a child, hardly more than eight or nine, if
judged from the size of the spindly, undeveloped figure. This was
swaddled in the ugly apron of blue-checked gingham, fastened down the
back with large bone buttons, and so long in the sleeves that the little
hands were all but lost, and so long in the skirt that only the ends of
the small copper-toed shoes showed beneath. Judged, however, by the
close-cropped head and the little sallow face that surmounted the
aproned figure, she might have been a woman of twenty-five, so maturely
developed was the one, so shrewd and knowing the other. The child leaned
her shoulders upon the whitewashed wall and stared at me in bold, though
not unfriendly curiosity, which, undoubtedly, I reciprocated. She was
evidently sizing me up. I smiled, and she screwed her full, sensitive
mouth into a judicial expression, puckering her forehead; then, in a
deep, contralto voice, she spoke. What she said I didn't hear, or rather
didn't grasp, in my wonder at the quality and timbre of that great
voice, which, issuing from the folds of the checked apron, seemed fairly
to fill the big hall below and the stair-well above with a deep,
beautiful sound. I apologized and asked her to repeat what she had said.

"Your skirt--it's so stylish," she said, and the little hand stole out
and began stroking the snugly-fitting serge of that very unpretentious
garment.

"I'm very glad you lik