A Little Girl in Old New York - Amanda Minnie Douglas (the beginning after the end read novel txt) 📗

and pretty light carpets with flowers and green leaves all over them. There was music and dancing and a supper, and old Mr. Beekman walked round with her and told her Katschina wasn't well at all, and he was afraid he should lose her. Dolly said she was to come up on Friday after school and stay until Monday morning. Would Margaret and Dr. Hoffman have a house like this some time?

She had more lessons to learn now. And grammar was curiously associated with Mrs. Murray being so sweet and attentive to the British officers while the Federal soldiers stole along--she could fairly see them with her vivid imagination. History began to unfold the great world before her. Another thing interested her, and this was that every pleasant day Daisy Jasper came to school for the morning session. She was very backward, of course, for she had never been to school at all. She could walk now without her crutch, but Sam was always very careful of her. The Jasper house became the rendezvous for the girls, as the Deans' had been. Even bonnie Prince Charlie was allowed to go there. Daisy loved so to see them dance to the music of her wonderful box. But Charles had not been able to buy his accordeon. He needed a new suit of clothes if he had any money to throw away, and Mrs. Reed insisted this should be put in the bank when his father said he could buy him all the clothes he needed.

Some of the girls at school were making pretty things for a fair to be held in the basement of the Church of the Epiphany in Stanton Street, and they begged Hanny to help. They were to have a fair at Martha's church also, and the little fingers flew merrily. Hanny had found a new accomplishment, and she was very proud to bring it into the school. This was crocheting. Next door to the stable in Houston Street lived a very tidy German family with a host of little children. The man did cobbling, mending boots and shoes. His wife did shoe binding and stitching leather "foxings" on cloth tops for gaiters. Button shoes had not come in. They either laced in front or at the side. And very few ladies wore anything higher than the spring heel, as it was called. To be sure, some of them did wear foolishly thin shoes, but there were rubbers unless you disdained them; and they were real India-rubber, and no mistake, rather clumsy oftentimes, but they lasted two or three years.

The little German girls, Lena and Gretchen, took care of the babies and did the work. It seemed to Hanny they were always busy. Lena knit stockings and mittens and caps, and her small fingers flew like birds. One day she was doing something very beautiful with pink zephyr and an ivory needle with a tiny hook at the end.

"Oh, what is it?" cried Hanny eagerly.

"Lace. Crocheted lace. A lady on Grand Street will give me ten cents a yard. It is for babies' petticoats. And you can make caps and hoods and fascinators. It plagued me a little at first, but now I can do it so fast, much faster than knitting it. And I am to have all the work I can do."

"Oh, if I could learn!" cried Hanny.

"I'll show you because you are so good to us. Your boy brought mother such a package of clothes. But I am not going to teach the girls around here. They will be wanting to do it for the stores. You can make lace with cotton thread and oh! elegant with silk. That is worth a good deal."

Hanny bought her needle and worsted. At first she was "bothered" as well. But she was an ingenious little girl, and when you once had the "knack" there were such infinite varieties to it. And oh, it was so fascinating! She hardly had time to study her lessons, and one day she did actually miss in her definitions. But she begged Mrs. Craven to let her study them over and recite after school, for she knew her father would feel badly about the imperfect mark.

When she had made two yards of beautiful pink lace she showed it to Margaret. She meant to make two yards of blue and give them both to Katy Rhodes for her table at the Fair. Margaret was very much pleased and said she must learn herself. Daisy Jasper did a little, too. She was learning very rapidly and had a wonderful genius for drawing.

Oh, dear! how busy they were. They were happy and interested, and almost forgot to take out their dolls, or read their story-books. Martha said: "You might do something for my fair, too," and Margaret promised.

Jim _did_ feel a little sore that Lily Ludlow did not ask him to her party, which was quite a grand affair. She announced that she had broken with the public-school crowd, and was going to have all new friends. But the very next week she met Jim at another party, and he was so handsome and manly that she really regretted her haste. Jim was very proud and dignified, and never once danced with her nor chose her in any of the games.

Dolly and Stephen came home to the Thanksgiving dinner. If Hanny had not been so much engrossed she might have considered herself left out of some things, only her father never left her out. And Ben brought home such tempting books that she did wish she could sit up like the others and not have to go to bed at nine.

The Epiphany fair came first, the week before Christmas. The Sunday-school room was all dressed with greens, and tables arranged over the tops of the seats with long boards, covered with white cloths. And oh, the lovely articles! Everything it seemed that fingers could make, useful or ornamental, from handsomely dressed dolls to pincushions, from white aprons with lace and ribbon bows on the dainty pockets down to unromantic holders. Everybody laughed and chatted and were as gay as gay could be.

In the back room that was rented out for a day school--indeed, the little girl had come quite near being sent here--there were tables for refreshments. The coffee and tea had a delightful fragrance, and the different dishes looked wonderfully tempting.

It was Hanny's first fair, but people didn't expect to take children out everywhere then, or indeed to go themselves. There was more home life, real family life. Her father was her escort, and her mother had said: "Now don't make the child sick by feeding her all kinds of trash, or she can't go out again this winter." So you see they had to be careful. But they had some delightful cake and cream, and he bought her a pound of candy tied up in a pretty box, and the loveliest little work-basket with a row of blue silk pockets around the inside.

Katy Rhodes was waiting at a table with her mother, but she found an opportunity to whisper to Hanny "that her lace had sold the very first thing, and there had been such a call for it she just wished they had had a hundred yards."

That pleased the child very much.

"It was like a store," said Hanny to her mother; "only everybody seemed to know everybody, and there were all kinds of things. So many people came for their suppers they must have made lots of money. And I'm as tired as I can be, only it _was_ beautiful."

Martha's church was to have their Christmas Sunday-school anniversary, and Charles Reed was to sing a solo with a chorus of four voices. The Deans and half the people in the street went. Margaret and Dr. Hoffman, and this time John and Ben took the little girl. Mother had been up at Steve's all day.

There was a large platform at the end of the church, and crowds of pretty children dressed in white, ranged in tiers one above another. After a prayer and singing by the congregation the real exercises began. The body of children sang some beautiful hymns, then there were several spirited dialogues, and separate pieces, very well rendered indeed. When it came "bonnie Prince Charlie's" turn, he seemed to hesitate a moment. Hanny thought she would be frightened to death before all the people. I think Charles would have been a year ago.

The piano began the soft accompaniment. After the first few notes the sweet young voice swelled out like the warble of a bird. People were silent with surprise and admiration. The fair, boyish face and slim figure looked smaller there on the platform. The face had a youthful sweetness that nowadays would be pronounced artistic.

The chorus came in beautifully. There were three verses in the solo, and really, I do not know as the audience were to blame for applauding. The boy had to come out and sing again, this time a pretty Christmas carol that they had practised at singing-school.

When the exercises were finished the children were all taken down-stairs and they looked very pretty flitting about. There was another surprise, one that greatly interested the little girl. In one prettily arranged booth were two curious small beings who had a history. They had already been in Sunday-school on two occasions. A missionary to China, seeing these little girls about to be sold, had rescued them by buying them himself. He had brought them back on his return, and now kindly disposed people were making up a sum to provide them with a home and educate them.

Hanny pressed forward holding John's hand tightly. They were so strange-looking. The larger and older one was not at all pretty, but the younger one had a sweet sort of shyness and was not so stolid. Their yellow-brown skins, oblique dark eyes, black brows, and black hair done up in a remarkable fashion with some long pins, and their Chinese attire seemed very curious. The gentleman with them said there were hundreds of little girls sold in China, and that women bought them for future wives for their sons, and treated them like bond slaves. These children's feet had not been cramped, this was done mainly to the higher orders. He had some Chinese shoes worn by grown women, and they were such short, queer things, like some of the pincushions made for the Fair.

We didn't suppose then the Chinese would come and live with us and have a Chinatown in the heart of the city; do our laundry work and take possession of our kitchens; that the blue shirts and queer pointed shoes would be a common sight in our streets. So the Chinese children were a curiosity. Indeed, several years elapsed before Hanny saw another inhabitant of the Flowery Kingdom.

"Don't you want to put something in the box?" John held out a quarter to the little girl.

Her eyes sparkled with pleasure. Then she shook hands with the small Chinese maidens, and she felt almost as if she had been to a foreign country.

If Mrs. Reed had been present she would have marched Charles home in short order. She did not believe in praising children, or anybody else for that matter. Everybody, in her opinion, needed a strict hand. She hardly approved of the singing-school, and if she had really understood that Charles would stand out alone facing the audience, and then be applauded for what he had done, and go into the fair and be praised and "treated," she would have been horrified and put him on the strictest sort of discipline for the