Mamie. "Mummer's they shrunk so she
couldn't wear 'em, and Jessy couldn't nuther."

"What is your mother wearing?" asked Maria.

"Mr. John Dorsey he bought her some new ones," replied Mamie, and a
light of evil intelligence came into the mean little face.

"Who is Mr. John Dorsey?" asked Maria.

"Oh, he's to our house considerable," replied Mamie, still with that
evil light, which grew almost confidential, upon her face.

The boy chuckled a little and dug his toes into the frozen earth,
then he whistled.

The Ramsey house was the original old homestead of the family. It was
unspeakably decrepit and fallen from a former high estate. The old
house presented to Maria's fancy something in itself degraded and
loathsome. It seemed to partake actually of the character of its
inmates--to be stained and swollen and out of plumb with
unmentionable sins of degeneration. It was a very poisonous fungus of
a house, with blotches of paint here and there, with its front
portico supported drunkenly on swaying pillars, with its roof
hollowed about the chimney, with great stains here and there upon the
walls, which seemed like stains of sin rather than of old rains.
Maria marched straight to the house, leading Jessy, with Mamie and
Franky at her heels. She knocked on the door; there was no bell, of
course. But Franky pushed past her and opened the door, and sang out,
in his raucous voice:

"Hullo, mummer! Mummer!"

Mamie echoed him in her equally raucous voice, full of dissonances.
"Mummer! Mummer!"

A woman, large and dirty, but rather showily clad, with a brave
display of cheap jewelry, appeared in the doorway of a room on the
right, from which also issued a warm, spirituous odor, mingled with
onions and boiling meat. The woman, who had at one time been weakly
pretty, and even now was not bad-looking, stared with a sort of
vacant defiance at Maria.

"It's teacher, mummer," volunteered Mamie.

Franky chuckled again, and again whistled. Franky's chuckles and
whistles were characteristic of him. He often disturbed the school in
such fashion.

Maria had a vision of a man in his shirt-sleeves, smoking beside a
red-hot stove, on which boiled the meat and onions. She began at once
upon her errand.

"How do you do, Mrs. Ramsey?" said she.

The woman mumbled something inarticulate and backed a little. The man
in the room leaned forward and rolled bloodshot eyes at her. Maria
began at once. She had much of her mother's spirit