aware of my existence; the vacant, flushed look was almost
always in his face when we met, and he stayed out so late in the evening
that it was not often his stumbling footsteps aroused me when he came
upstairs to bed.

So accustomed had I become to my lonely hours by the kitchen stove, with
Samuel curled up at my feet, that when one night, about six months after
my mother's death, I heard the unexpected sound of my father's tread on
the pavement outside, I turned almost with a feeling of terror, and
waited breathlessly for his unsteady hand on the door. It came after a
minute, followed immediately by his entrance into the kitchen, and to my
amazement I saw presently that he was accompanied by a strange woman,
whom I recognised at a glance as one of those examples of her sex that
my mother had been used to classify sweepingly as "females." She was
plump and jaunty, with yellow hair that hung in tight ringlets down to
her neck, and pink cheeks that looked as if they might "come off" if
they were thoroughly scrubbed. There was about her a spring, a bounce,
an animation that impressed me, in spite of my inherited moral sense, as
decidedly elegant.

My father's eyes looked more vacant and his face fuller than ever.
"Benjy," he began at once in a husky voice, while his companion released
his arm in order to put her ringlets to rights, "I've brought you a new
mother."

At this the female's hands fell from her hair, and she looked round in
horror. "What boy is that, Thomas?" she demanded, poised there in all
her flashing brightness like a figure of polished brass.

"That boy," replied my father, as if at a loss exactly how to account
for me, "that boy is Ben Starr--otherwise Benjy--otherwise--"

He would have gone on forever, I think, in his eagerness to explain me
away, if the woman had not jerked him up with a peremptory question:
"How did he come here?" she enquired.

Since nothing but the naked truth would avail him now, he uttered it at
last in an eloquent monosyllable--"Born."

"But you told me there was not a chick or a child," she exclaimed in a
rage.

For a moment he hesitated; then opening his mouth slowly, he gave voice
to the single witticism of his life.

"That was befo' I married you, dearie," he said.

"Well, how am I to know," demanded the female, "that you haven't got a
parcel of others hidden away?"

"Thar's one, the littlest, put out to nurse next do', an' another, the
biggest, gone to work in