cels of cold victuals, which she was always sure to get at
certain kitchen doors from kindly people who didn't care for her poor
brown twists. There had been days in the past when Easter peddled light,
porous sticks of snow-white taffy, cakes of toothsome sugar-candy filled
with fresh orange-blossoms, and pralines of pecans or cocoa-nut. But one
cannot do everything.

One cannot be expected to remember General Jackson, spin long,
imaginative yarns of forgotten days, and make up-to-date pralines at the
same time. If the people who had ears to listen had known the thing to
value, this old, old woman could have sold her memories, her wit, and
even her imagination better than she had ever sold her old-fashioned
sweets.

But the world likes molasses candy. And so Old Easter, whose meagre
confections grew poorer as her stories waxed in richness, walked the
streets in rags and dirt and absolute obscurity.

An old lame dog, seeming instinctively to know her as his companion in
misery, one day was observed to crouch beside her, and, seeing him, she
took down her basket and entertained him from her loose paper parcels.

And once--but this was many years ago, and the incident was quite
forgotten now--when a crowd of street fellows began pelting Crazy Jake,
a foolish, half-paralyzed black boy, who begged along the streets,
Easter had stepped before him, and, after receiving a few of their clods
in her face, had struck out into the gang of his tormenters, grabbed two
of its principal leaders by the seats of their trousers, spanked them
until they begged for mercy, and let them go.

Nobody knew what had become of Crazy Jake after that. Nobody cared. The
poor human creature who is not due at any particular place at any
particular time can hardly be missed, even when the time comes when he
himself misses the _here_ and the _there_ where he has been wont to
spend his miserable days, even when he, perhaps having no one else, it
is possible that he misses his tormenters.

It was a little school-girl who saw the old woman lower her basket to
share her scraps with the street dog. It seemed to her a pretty act,
and so she told it when she went home. And she told it again at the next
meeting of the particular "ten" of the King's Daughters of which she was
a member.

And this was how the name of Easter, the old black candy-woman, came to
be written upon their little book as their chosen object of charity for
the coming year.

The nam