There was a patter of soft feet across the carpet, and Fritz poked his
sympathetic nose into her face. She put her arms around him, and laid
her head against his curly back with a desolate sob.

It is pitiful to think how much imaginative children suffer through
their wrong conception of things. She had seen the little roll of bills
in her mother's pocketbook. She had seen how much smaller it grew every
time it was taken out to pay for the expensive wines and medicines that
had to be bought so often. She had heard her mother tell the doctor that
was all that stood between them and the poorhouse.

There was no word known to the Little Colonel that brought such,
thoughts of horror as the word poorhouse.

Her most vivid recollection of her life in New York was something that
happened a few weeks before they left there. One day in the park she ran
away from the maid, who, instead of Mom Beck, had taken charge of her
that afternoon.

When the angry woman found her, she frightened her almost into a spasm
by telling her what always happened to naughty children who ran away.

"They take all their pretty clothes off," she said, "and dress them up
in old things made of bed-ticking. Then they take 'm to the poorhouse,
where nobody but beggars live. They don't have anything to eat but
cabbage and corndodger, and they have to eat that out of tin pans. And
they just have a pile of straw to sleep in."

On their way home she had pointed out to the frightened child a poor
woman who was grubbing in an ash-barrel.