ation: "BIDDY HELD IT OUT IN A KIND OF STUPEFIED DELIGHT."]

On this cold morning, in front of the wide stone steps of Lily De
Koven's home, Biddy had found an ash can, and, poking over the ashes,
had found and pulled out the very broken-armed doll which Lily had
ordered to be thrown away, which Mary the cook had stripped of its fine
robes, and which had last of all been swept up and put in the ash
barrel, and so had come to the lowest possible condition of a once rich
doll. Biddy held it out, and looked straight before her for a moment,
at nothing in particular, in a kind of stupefied delight; for a doll,
even such a doll as this, had never been in her little cramped, purple
hands before. Then suddenly she tucked it in her breast, drew her dingy
sacque around it tight, caught up her rag bag, and with a scared glance
at the windows of Lily's fine home, she ran down the street.

Her heart beat so that it was like a little hammer striking quick blows
against the breast of the doll. Biddy had never had anything to love,
and from the moment she had got this doll hidden in her bosom she loved
it, and I think she was in good luck to have found something which could
bring her this dear feeling. And as for the doll, in its proudest days
it had never been loved, and now, when forlorn and cast out, it had
found a warm heart, and had come, if it could only have known it, into
the best luck of its whole life.

I should like to tell you the whole story of Biddy O'Dolan--of what she
did for the doll, and what the doll did for her; but to-day I want to
call your attention to something else, and if you will heed my wish, I
will heed yours, and soon tell you the rest of Biddy's story.

The good things that come to us have a way--which you will notice if you
are observant--of seeming to connect themselves together in a circle of
sweet thoughts and hopes, just as our friends might join hands and make
a ring around us.

It was so with Biddy that day. As she ran on with her doll she was
constantly thinking of something which she had hardly thought of since
it had happened two years before. It was this: Biddy had been run over
by a horse and cart, and carried, much hurt, to one of the New York
hospitals for children. There she had been tenderly cared for, which was
a great mystery to Biddy, and on Christmas morning she had waked up to
find beautiful fresh Christmas greens on the wall at the foot of her
little cot and around the window, a