who had been sent on an errand
against her will, that it was not late, and she was safe enough on
that road. He resumed his calculation as to whether his income would
admit of a new coal-stove that winter. He was a workman in a
factory, with one accumulative interest in life--coal-stoves. He
bought and traded and swapped coal-stoves every winter with keenest
enthusiasm. Now he had one in his mind which he had just viewed in a
window with the rapture of an artist. It had a little nickel
statuette on the top, and that quite crowded Ellen out of his mind,
which had but narrow accommodations.

So Ellen kept on unmolested, though her heart was beating loud with
fright. When she came into the brilliantly lighted stretch of Main
Street, which was the business centre of the city, her childish mind
was partly diverted from herself. Ellen had not been down town many
times of an evening, and always in hand of her hurrying father or
mother. Now she had run away and cut loose from all restrictions of
time; there was an eternity for observation before her, with no call
in-doors in prospect. She stopped at the first bright shop window,
and suddenly the exultation of freedom was over the child. She
tasted the sweets of rebellion and disobedience. She had stood
before that window once before of an evening, and her aunt Eva had
been with her, and one of her young men friends had come up behind,
and they had gone on, the child dragging backward at her aunt's
hand. Now she could stand as long as she wished, and stare and
stare, and drink in everything which her childish imagination
craved, and that was much. The imagination of a child is often like
a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes within reach, and
producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations almost endless in
their effects upon the growth. This window before which Ellen stood
was that of a market: a great expanse of plate-glass framing a crude
study in the clearest color tones. It takes a child or an artist to
see a picture without the intrusion of its second dimension of
sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity.

Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables
and fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did
not for one instant connect anything thereon with the ends of
physical appetite, though she had not had her supper. What had a
meal of beefsteak and potatoes and squash served on the little
white-laid table at home to