“Hush, Wallie!” said the young lady whose face was very sweet, “you should not speak so to the little boy. He looks very poor and very cold. Come here, boy, and tell me your name and where you live.” She held her hand towards the child, who was scowling defiantly at Wallie, but who, at the sound of her voice, seemed intuitively to recognize an ally in her, and replied: “He ’allus calls me tow-head, or out-at-the-knees, ’cause my hair’s white and my trouses is tore. I can’t help it, I didn’t make myself.” “Who did make you?” the young girl asked, and Bennie replied, “I dunno, mother’s dead and pa gets drunk. I dunno nothing.” “Don’t know who made you! That’s dreadful,” the lady said. “Why, you poor child, you must come to Sunday school and into my class and I will tell you about God. Will you come next Sunday? It is the church on the corner.” “Will _he_ be there?” Bennie asked, nodding towards Wallie. “Yes, he is in my class, and I am his Aunt Nellie; but he will be very kind to you. He is not a bad boy. Come, and perhaps you may get something at Christmas. Do you know what that is?” “Yes, it’s when the old chap fetches things down the chimbly; but he never brung me none. We’re poor, and Hetty keeps house and runs the streets all the time, and Mag and I is alone. I’ll tell Maggie, and mayby she’ll come. She’s got a new gown Miss Katy give her. I must go now, we are goin’ to have hasty puddin’ for dinner.” He took his heavy basket and almost staggering under the load walked slowly away. As usual at that time of day Hetty was out, but Maggie, a dark faced girl of twelve, was waiting for him, and with her help a fire was soon kindled in the old broken stove, and the hasty pudding, of which Bennie had spoken, was boiling and bubbling in the one kettle the miserable house afforded. “I wish we had some ’lasses, don’t you?” Bennie said, as Maggie poured into his dish more than half of the blue milk she had begged of a neighbor. But molasses was a luxury quite beyond the means of the Hewitts, and so Bennie ate his pudding and skimmed milk, and told Maggie of Wallie Morgan who had called him tow-heard and of the beautiful lady who had invited him to Sunday school. “Yes that’s Nellie Morgan, his aunt; his mother’s dead, and she keeps house and has a class, a big one, in Sunday school, and give Jane Shaw a doll and a dress and lots of candy and pop-corn last Christmas, and her brother Tim got a top and a whip.” “My, that’s jolly; less go to her class next Sunday,” Bennie said, his fancy caught with the top and the whip, and the shoes which would keep his little red toes from the cold. But Bennie was a delicate child and when Sunday came he was sick and lay on an old rug in a little room off from the kitchen where he was safe from his drunken father, while Maggie went to church and into Miss Morgan’s class.