One bright, sunny October day, when the air was clear and bracing, and the wind was tossing the red leaves that fell from the trees in the squares, Lucy and Stella were on their way home from school, when they heard at a slight distance the plaintive strains of a hand-organ, carried by a meagre, careworn Italian, who seemed to be working his instrument mechanically, while his eye had a fixed, sad, stedfast gaze, unconscious, seemingly, of anything around him. Lucy was looking compassionately at the dark, sorrowful face, and wondering what his previous history might have been, when her eye was suddenly caught by the familiar form and face of the girl who stood by with her tambourine, singing a simple ditty, which somehow brought old days at Ashleigh back to her mind. The figure she saw, though arrayed in tattered garments, and the face, though sunburnt to a deep brown, were not so much altered as to prevent almost instant recognition. Lucy grasped Stella's arm, and exclaimed, "Why, it's Nelly!" and before the astonished Stella comprehended her meaning, she hastily stepped forward towards the tambourine-girl, who almost at the same moment stopped singing and sprang forward, exclaiming, "Oh, it's Miss Lucy, her own self!" Both were quite unconscious, in their surprise, of the bystanders around them; but Stella was by no means so insensible to the situation, and was somewhat scandalized at being connected with such a scene "in the street." She begged Lucy to ask Nelly to follow them home, which was not far off, and then they could have any number of explanations at leisure. Lucy at once assented, and asked Nelly if she could be spared for a little while. With a happy face, flushed with her surprise and delight, Nelly went up to the organ-grinder and said a few words, at which he smiled and nodded. She then followed her friends home at a respectful distance, while the man went on his way from house to house. Nelly's explanation of her present odd circumstances was very simple, and, on the whole, satisfactory. In the hot July weather, when she felt her overtasked strength failing, and could scarcely manage to drag herself about to perform her daily round of duty, often scolded for doing it inefficiently, the poor organ-grinder came one day with a face more sorrowful than ever, and told Nelly, weeping, that his daughter--his _povera picciola_--had been carried off by one of those sudden attacks that so soon run their course and snap the thread of weakly lives. He was so lonely now, he said, he could not bear it! Would Nelly come and be his daughter, and take poor Teresa's forsaken tambourine? She had a voice sweet as Teresa's own, and he would teach her to sing when he played. She should have no hard work, and no scolding, and they would take care of each other.