ain with
a sounding kiss. "Don't you let your big ears ache, you little
pitcher," said he, with a gay laugh. "Little doll-babies like you
haven't anythin' to worry about if Lloyd's shut down every day in
the year."

"They're the very ones whom it concerns," said Nahum Beals, when
Ellen and her mother had gone up-stairs.

"Well, I wouldn't have had that little nervous thing hear all this,
if I'd thought," Andrew said, anxiously.

Joseph Atkins, whom Fanny had stationed in a sheltered corner near
the stove when she opened the door, peered around at Andrew.

"Seems as if she was too young to get much sense of it," he
remarked. "My Maria, that's her age, wouldn't."

"Ellen hears everything and makes her own sense of it," said Andrew,
"and the Lord only knows what she's made of this. I hope she won't
fret over it."

"I wish my tongue had been cut off before I said anything before
her," cried Eva. "I know just what that child is. She'll find out
what a hard world she's in soon enough, anyway, and I don't want to
be the one to open her eyes ahead of time."

Ellen went to bed quietly, and her mother did not think she had paid
much attention to what had been going on, and said so when she went
down-stairs after Ellen had been kissed and tucked in bed and the
lamp put out. "I guess she didn't mind much about it, after all,"
she said to Andrew. "I guess the room was pretty warm, and that was
what made her cheeks so red."

But Ellen, after her mother left her, turned her little head towards
the wall and wept softly, lest some one hear her, but none the less
bitterly that she had no right conception of the cause of her grief.
There was over her childish soul the awful shadow of the labor and
poverty of the world. She knew naught of the substance behind the
shadow, but the darkness terrified her all the more, and she cried
and cried as if her heart would break. Then she, with a sudden
resolution, born she could not have told of what strange
understanding and misunderstanding of what she had heard that
evening, slipped out of bed, groped about until she found her
cherished doll, sitting in her little chair in the corner. She was
accustomed to take the doll to bed with her, and had undressed her
for that purpose early in the evening, but she had climbed into bed
and left her sitting in the corner.

"Don't you want your dolly?" her mother had asked.

"No, ma'am; I guess I don't want her to-night," Ellen had replied,
with