you, and was as 'fraid to touch you at fust as if
you'd been a bombshell to blow me up! I rubbed my eyes to see if I was
awake. I crept up to you and shrank back from you ever so many times,
before I could venture to touch you. Then I saw a card tied to the
handle of the basket. I took it off, put on my specks, and read this:

"'A GEM FOR MRS. WINTEROSE.'

"Then, my dear, I saw that somebody who wanted to get shet of a baby,
had put it off on to me. And, Lord forgive me, I struck mad as hop, and
said I wouldn't have the brat, and would send it to the alms-house. But,
lor! there is a power in helplessness compared to which the power of a
monarch is all moonshine! And however angry I might a felt at that
minute with the unnatural monsters who I thought had dropped the baby
there, why, I could no more a sent it to the alms-house than I could a
smothered it in its basket," said the soft-hearted old dame, wiping away
the tears that rose to her eyes at the very idea of such a piece of
cruelty.

"So you took the little creature in?" smiled Gem.

"What else could I do? I was shivering with cold myself. Could I leave
it out there? No. I took hold of the handle of the basket--which it was
a large open clothes basket with a handle at each end, and very useful
I have found it ever since to put the siled clothes in--and I began to
drag it through the door and through the back room into this very room.
But the motion waked the baby up, and it opened the darkest blue eyes I
ever had seen in my life, and looked at me as calm and quiet as if it
had known me all my life, and then it opened its little rosy lips, and
said:

"'GAMMA!'

"Yes, my dear Gem, that was what you called me from the first, 'Gamma.'
It went straight to my heart, Gem! And why? Because I was sixty years
old then, and my hair was as white as it is now, and I never had a baby
in the world to call me grandma: all because Tabby and Libby didn't
marry as they ought to have done twenty years before that."

"You're always hitting of us in the teeth about that, mother, as if it
was our fault. As for me I would have married fast enough if William
Simpson hadn't a proved false," snivelled Miss Tabby.

"Bosh! there's as good fish in the sea as ever was got out of it,"
snapped the old lady.

"It was our fate," said the superstitious Miss Libby.

"You made your own fate," answered the inexorable old lady.

"So you adopted the poor little forsaken child," put in Gem, t