Lizzie sat stroking and brushing the beautiful hair, when they were at
home again, and as she kissed her good-night, a miserable old man
stumbled into the room. "How's my Jenny Wren, best of children?" he
mumbled, as he shuffled unsteadily towards her, but Jenny pointed her
small finger towards him exclaiming--"Go along with you, you bad,
wicked, old child, you troublesome, wicked, old thing, _I_ know where
you have been; ain't you ashamed of yourself, you disgraceful boy?"
"Yes; my dear, yes," stammered the tipsy old father, tumbling into a
corner. One day when Jenny was on her way home with Riah, they came on a
small crowd of people. A tipsy man had been knocked down and badly
hurt--"Let us see what it is!" said Jennie. The next moment she
exclaimed--"Oh, gentlemen--gentlemen, he is my child, he belongs to me,
my poor, bad, old child!"
"Your child--belongs to you--" repeated the man who was about to lift
the helpless figure on to a stretcher. "Aye, it's old Dolls--tipsy old
Dolls--" cried some one in the crowd, for it was by this name that they
knew the old man.
"He's her father, sir," said Riah in a low tone to the doctor who was
now bending over the stretcher.
"So much the worse," answered the doctor, "for the man is dead."
Yes, "Mr. Dolls" was dead, and many were the dresses which the weary
fingers of the sorrowful little worker must make in order to pay for his
humble funeral, and buy a black frock for herself. Often the tears
rolled down on to her work. "My poor child," she said to Riah, "my poor
old child, and to think I scolded him so."
"You were always a good, brave, patient girl," returned Riah, "always
good and patient, however tired."
And so the poor little "person of the house" was left alone but for the
faithful affection of the kind Jew, and her friend Lizzie. Her room grew
pretty comfortable, for she was in great request in her "profession" as
she called it, and there was now no one to spend and waste her earnings.
But nothing could make her life otherwise than a suffering one till the
happy morning, when her child-angels visited her for the last time and
carried her away to the land where all such pain as hers is healed for
evermore.
PIP'S ADVENTURE.
All that little Philip Pirrip, usually called Pip, knew about his father
and mother, and five little brothers, was from seeing their tombstones
in the churchyard. He was taken care of by his sister, who was twenty
years older than himself. She had married a blacksmith, named Joe
Gargery, a kind, good man, while she, unfortunately, was a hard, stern
woman, and treated her little brother and her amiable husband with great
harshness. They lived in a marshy part of the country, about twenty
miles from the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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