“Oh, Princey!” gasped Carolyn May. “I b’lieve he’s making long, curly
shavings!”
If there was one thing Carolyn May adored, it was curls. Because her own
sunny hair was almost perfectly straight, she thought the very loveliest
thing a fairy godmother could do for her was to fit her out with a
perfect suit of curls.
There had been a carpenter shop only two blocks from where she lived in
Harlem, and she and her friend, Edna Price, had sometimes gone there and
begged a few curly shavings with which to bedeck themselves. But they
could never get as many shavings as they wanted there, for the man swept
them up every day and put them in bags, to be sold for baling.
But here, at this carpenter’s shop, she had seen, only the afternoon
before, great heaps of the most beautiful, curly, smelly shavings! She
drew nearer, her hand upon Prince’s collar, and stood looking at the old
man with the silver-bowed spectacles pushing away at the jack-plane.
Suddenly, Mr. Jedidiah Parlow looked up and saw the wistful,
dust-streaked face under the black hat-brim and above the black frock.
He stared at her for fully a minute, poising the plane over his work.
Then he put it down and came to the door of the shop.
“You’re Hannah Stagg’s little girl, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice
Carolyn May thought almost as dry as his shavings.
“Yes, sir,” she said, and sighed. Dear me, he knew who she was right
away! There would not be any chance of her getting a suit of long curls.
“You’ve come here to live, have you?” said Mr. Parlow slowly.
“Yes, sir. You see, my papa and mamma were lost at sea—with the
_Dunraven_. It was a mistake, I guess,” sighed the little girl, “for
they weren’t fighting anybody. But the _Dunraven_ got in the way of some
ships that were fighting, in a place called the Mediterranean Ocean, and
the _Dunraven_ was sunk, and only a few folks were saved from it. My
papa and mamma weren’t saved.”
“So?” said the carpenter, pushing his big spectacles up to his forehead.
“I read about it. Too bad—too mighty bad! I remember Hannah Stagg,” he
added, winking his eyes, Carolyn May thought, a good deal as Prince did.
“You look like her.”
“Do I?” Carolyn May returned, drawing nearer. “I’m glad I do. And I’m
glad I sleep in what used to be her bed, too. It doesn’t seem so
lonesome.”
“So? I reckoned you’d be lonesome up there at The Corners,” said the
carpenter. “Is that your dog?”
“He’s Prince—yes, sir,” Carolyn May said, looking at the panting mongrel
proudly. “He’s a _splendid_ dog. I know he must be valuable, even if he
is a mongorel. He got his paw hurt once, and papa and I took him to a
vetrernary.
“A vetrernary,” explained Carolyn May, “is a dog doctor. And I heard
this one tell my papa that there must be blood of ’most all kinds of
dogs there was in Prince’s veins. There aren’t many dogs like him.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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