joyment from watching my
appetite; and before I had finished, the ten cheerful children trooped
in and gathered about me. "Give him another cake, ma!" "It's my turn to
help him next, ma!" "I'll pour out his coffee for him!" "Oh, ma, let me
feed the dog," rose in a jubilant chorus of shrieks.

"An' he ain't got any mother!" roared Tommy suddenly, and burst into
tears.

A sob lodged in my throat, but before the choking sound of it reached my
ears, I felt myself enfolded in Mrs. Chitling's embrace. As I looked up
at her from this haven of refuge, it seemed to me that her curl papers
were transfigured into a halo, and that her face shone with a heavenly
beauty.

I was given a bed in the attic, with the six younger Chitlings, and two
days later, when my father tracked me to my hiding-place, I hid under
the dark staircase in the hall, and heard my protector deliver an
eloquent invective on the subject of stepmothers. It was the one
occasion in my long acquaintance with her when I saw her fairly roused
out of her amiable inertia. Albemarle, the baby, had spilled bacon gravy
over her dress that very morning, and I had heard her console him
immediately with the assurance that there was "a plenty more in the
dish." But possessed though she was with that peculiar insight which
discerns in every misfortune a hidden blessing, in stepmothers, I found,
and in stepmothers alone, she could discern nothing except sermons.

"To think of yo' havin' the brazen impudence to come here arter the harm
you've done that po' defenceless darling boy," she said, with a noble
dignity which obscured somehow her slovenly figure and her dirty
kitchen. Peering out from under the staircase, I could see that my
father stood quite humbly before her, twirling his hatbrim nervously in
his hands.

"I ax you to believe, mum, what is the gospel truth," he replied, "that
I wa'nt meanin' any harm to Benjy."

"Not meanin' any harm an' you brought him a stepmother befo' six months
was up?" she cried. "Well, that ain't _my_ way of lookin' at it, for
I've a mother's heart and it takes a mother's heart to stand the tricks
of children," she added, glancing down at the gravy stains on her bosom,
"an' it ain't to be supposed--is it?--that a stepmother should have a
mother's heart? It ain't natur--is it?--I put it to you, that any man or
woman should be born with a natchel taste for screamin' an' kickin' an'
bein' splashed with gravy, an' the only thing that's goin'