Next door to the bad girl's house there lived a very respectable family --
a family of good girls with whom we were allowed to play,
and from whom we got lollies (those hard old red-and-white "fish lollies"
that grocers sent home with parcels of groceries and receipted bills).
Now one washing day, they being as glad to get rid of us at home
as we were to get out, we went over to the good house and found no one at home
except the grown-up daughter, who used to sing for us,
and read "Robinson Crusoe" of nights, "out loud", and give us more lollies
than any of the rest -- and with whom we were passionately in love,
notwithstanding the fact that she was engaged to a "grown-up man" --
(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the way by the time we were old enough
to marry her). She was washing. She had carried the stool and tub
over against the stick fence which separated her house from the bad house;
and, to our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had brought HER tub over
against her side of the fence. They stood and worked with their shoulders
to the fence between them, and heads bent down close to it.
The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her,
over and over again. They sang very low, we thought.
Presently the good grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us.
She jumped, and her face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool
and carried it, tub and all, away from that fence in a hurry.
And the bad grown-up girl took her tub back to her house.
The good grown-up girl made us promise never to tell what we saw
-- that she'd been talking to a bad girl -- else she would never,
never marry us.

She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother,
that the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing "Madeline"
that day.