readin'. 'Mr. Bemus,' she
says, 'that baby must be over the croup now. Won't you--won't you take
it down this orange an' see if you can't bring it up here awhile?'

"I went down, but, law!--where was the use? The Ketchup woman grabs up
her kid an' fair threw the orange at me. 'You don't know what disease
you're bringin' in here,' she says--she had a voice like them gasoline
wood-cutters. I see she'd took to heart some o' the model-tenement
social-evenin' lectures on bugs an' worms in diseases. I carried the
orange out and give it to a kid in the ar'y, so's Mis' Loneway'd be
makin' somebody some pleasure, anyhow. An' then I went back upstairs an'
told her the kid was worse. Seems the croup had turned into cholery
infantum.

"'Why,' she says, 'I mus' send it down somethin' nice an' hot to-night,'
an' so she did, and I slips it back in the Loneway kitchen unbeknownst.
She wa'n't so very medicinal, either, bless her heart!

"'Tell me about that baby,' she says to me one noon. 'What's its name?
Does it like to hev its mother love it?' she ask me.

"I knew the truth to be that it didn't let anybody do anything day or
night within sight or sound of it, an' it looked to me like an imp o'
the dark. But I fixed up a tol'able description, an' left out the
freckles an' the temper, an' told her it was fat an' well an' a boy.
That seemed to satisfy her. Its name, though, sort o' stumped me. The
Tomato Ketchup called it mostly 'you-come-back-here-you-little-ape.' I
heard that every day. So I said, just to piece out my information, that
I thought its name might be April. That seemed to take her fancy, an'
after that she was always askin' me how little April was--but not when
Mr. Loneway was in hearin'. I see well enough she didn't want he should
know that she was grievin' none.

"All the time kep' comin', every night, another armful o' good things.
Land! that man he bought everything. Seems though he couldn't buy
enough. Every night the big platter was heaped up an' runnin' over with
everything under the sun, an' she was like another girl. I s'pose the
things give her strength, but I reck'n the cheer helped most. She had
the surprise to look forward to all day, an' there was plenty o' light,
evenin's; an' the stove, that was drove red-hot. The doctor kep' sayin'
she was better, too, an' everything seemed lookin' right up.

"Seems queer I didn't suspect from the first something was wrong. Seems
though I ought to 'a' known money di