of reach of those powerful, waving arms. "Do I know of any reason
for the child to run away?" shrieked Eva, in a voice shrilly hideous
with emotion, now and then breaking into hoarseness with the strain
of tears. "I guess I know why, I guess I do, and I wish I had been
six foot under ground before I did what I did. It was all my fault,
every bit of it. When I got home, and found that Fan had been making
that precious young one a dress out of my old blue one, I pitched
into her for it, and she gave it back to me, and then we jawed, and
kept it up, till Andrew, he grabbed the dress and flung it into the
fire, and did just right, too, and took Ellen and run over to old
lady Brewster's with her; then Ellen, she see him cryin', and it
scared her 'most to death, poor little thing, and she heard him say
that if it wasn't for her he'd quit, and then she come runnin' home
to her mother and me, and her mother said the same thing, and then
that poor young one, she thought she wa'n't wanted nowheres, and she
run. She always was as easy to hurt as a baby robin; it didn't take
nothing to set her all of a flutter and a twitter; and now she's
just flown out of the nest. Oh my God, I wish my tongue had been
torn out by the roots before I'd said a word about her blessed
little dress; I wish Fan had cut up every old rag I've got; I'd go
dressed in fig-leaves before I'd had it happen. Oh! oh! oh!"

Young Joe Bemis, of _The Star_, was the first to leave, whirling
madly and precariously down the street on his wheel, which was
dizzily tall in those days. Mrs. Zelotes, hailing him from her open
window, might as well have hailed the wind. Her family dissensions
were well aired in _The Star_ next morning, and she always kept the
cutting at the bottom of a little rosewood work-box where she stored
away divers small treasures, and never looked at the box without a
swift dart of pain as from a hidden sting and the consciousness as