were safely out of the way. A little allusion to a Home, which he caught
when he was just bringing in a four-leafed clover to show to Samantha,
completed the stock of ideas from which he reasoned. He was very clear
on one point, and that was that he would never be taken alive and put in
a Home with a capital H. He respected Homes, he approved of them, for
other boys, but personally they were unpleasant to him, and he had no
intention of dwelling in one if he could help it. The situation did not
appear utterly hopeless in his eyes. He had his original dollar and
eighty-five cents in money; Rags and he had supped like kings off wild
blackberries and hard gingerbread; and, more than all, he was young and
mercifully blind to all but the immediate present. Yet even in taking
the most commonplace possible view of his character it would be folly to
affirm that he was anything but unhappy. His soul was not sustained by
the consciousness of having done a self-forgetting and manly act, for he
was not old enough to have such a consciousness, which is something the
good God gives us a little later on, to help us over some of the hard
places.

"Nobody wants me! Nobody wants me!" he sighed, as he lay down under the
trees. "Nobody ever did want me,--I wonder why! And everybody loves my
darling Gay and wants to keep her, and I don't wonder about that. But,
oh, if I only belonged to somebody! (Cuddle up close, little Ragsy;
we've got nobody but just each other, and you can put your head into the
other pocket that hasn't got the gingerbread in it, if you please!) If
I only was like that little butcher's boy that he lets ride on the seat
with him, and hold the reins when he takes meat into the houses,--or if
I only was that freckled-face boy with the straw hat that lives on the
way to the store! His mother keeps coming out to the gate on purpose to
kiss him. Or if I was even Billy Pennell! He's had three mothers and two
fathers in three years, Jabe says. Jabe likes me, I think, but he can't
have me live at his house, because his mother is the kind that needs
plenty of room, he says,--and Samanthy has no house. But I did what I
tried to do. I got away from Minerva Court and found a lovely place for
Gay to live, with two mothers instead of one; and maybe they'll tell her
about me when she grows bigger, and then she'll know I didn't want to
run away from her, but whether they tell her or not, she's only a little
baby, and boys must always ta