out into the darkness, and hugging Samuel around his dirty
stomach besought him, with tears, to endure his lot in silence; but
though he licked my face rapturously at the time, I had no sooner
entered the house than his voice was lifted anew.

"To think of po' Mrs. Cudlip havin' to mourn in all that noise,"
commented my mother, as I undressed and got into my trundle-bed.

My pillow was quite moist before I went to sleep, while my mother's loud
threats against Samuel sounded from the other side of the room with each
separate garment that she laid on the chair at the foot of her bed. In
sheer desperation at last I pulled the cover over my ears in an effort
to shut out her thin, querulous tones. At the instant I felt that I was
wicked enough to wish that I had been born without any mother, and I
asked myself how _she_ would like it if I raised as great a fuss about
baby Jessy's crying as she did about Samuel's--who didn't make one-half
the noise.

Here the light went out, and I fell asleep, to awaken an hour or two
later because of the candle flash in my eyes. In the centre of the room
my mother was standing in her grey dressing-gown, with a shawl over her
head and the rapturously wriggling body of Samuel in her arms. Too
amazed to utter an exclamation, I watched her silently while she made a
bed with an old flannel petticoat before the waning fire. Then I saw her
bend over and pat the head of the puppy with her knotted hand before she
crept noiselessly back to bed.

At this day I see her figure as distinctly as I saw it that instant by
the candle flame--her soiled grey wrapper clutched over her flat bosom;
her sallow, sharp-featured face, with bluish hollows in the temples over
which her sparse hair strayed in locks; her thin, stooping shoulders
under the knitted shawl; her sad, flint-coloured eyes, holding always
that anxious look as if she were trying to remember some important thing
which she had half forgotten.

So she appeared to my startled gaze for a single minute. Then the light
went out, she faded into the darkness, and I fell asleep.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH I PLAY IN THE ENCHANTED GARDEN

For the next two years, when my mother sent me on errands to McKenney's
grocery store, or for a pitcher of milk to old Mrs. Triffit's, who kept
a fascinating green parrot hanging under an arbour of musk cluster
roses, it was my habit to run five or six blocks out of my way, and
measure my growing height against t