City and town life -- Fiction; Didactic fiction; Indiana -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
"My friends sit beside me," said Douglas. Mickey spoke softly: "Yes,
but if I watched him sharp, maybe I could get the hang of driving for
you. Think what a lump that would save. When I'm going, I'd love to
drive, just for the fun of it."
"And I wouldn't allow you to drive for less than I pay him," said
Douglas.
"I don't see why!" exclaimed Mickey.
"When you grow older and know me better, you will."
While the car was running its smoothest, while the country Mickey had
not seen save on rare newsboy excursions, flashed past, while the
wonder of the club house, the links, and the work he would have loved
to do developed, he shivered and cried in his tormented little soul:
"Gee, how will I ever keep Lily warm?" Douglas noticed his abstraction
and wondered. He had expected more appreciation of what Mickey was
seeing and doing; he was coming to the realization that he would find
out what was in the boy's heart in his own time and way. On the home
run, when Douglas reached his rooms, he told the driver to take Mickey
to the end of the car line; the boy shyly interposed to ask if he might
go to the "Star of Hope Hospital," so Douglas changed the order.
Mickey's passport held good at the hospital. The Sunshine Nurse
inspected the cakes and approved them. She was so particular she even
took a tiny nibble of one and said: "Sugar, flour, egg and
shortening--all right Mickey, those can't hurt her. And how is she
to-day?"
"Fine!" cried Mickey. "She is getting a lot stronger already. She can
sit up longer and help herself better, and she's got ribbons, the
prettiest you ever laid eyes on, that a lady gave me for her hair, and
they make her pink and nicer; and she's got a baby doll in long clean
white dresses to snuggle down and stay with her all day; and she's got
a slate, and a book, and she knows 'cow' and 'milk' and my name, and
to-day she is learning 'bread.' To-morrow I am going to teach her
'baby,' and she can say her prayer too nice for anything, once we got
it fixed so she'd say it at all."
"What did you teach her, Mickey?"
"'Now I lay me,' only Lily wouldn't say it the way She taught me. You
see Lily was all alone with her granny when she winked out and it
scared her most stiff, so when I got to that 'If I should die before I
wake,' line, she just went into fits, and remembering what I'd seen
myself, I didn't blame her; so I changed it for her 'til she liked it."
"Tell me about it, Mickey?" said the nurse.
"Well you see she has a window, so she can see the stars and the sun.
She knows them, so I just shifted the old sad, scary lines to:
"_Guard me through the starry night, Wake me safe with sunshine
bright!_"
"But Mickey, that's lovely!" cried the nurse. "Wait till I write it
down! I'll teach it to my little people. Half of them come here knowing
that prayer and when they are ill, they begin to think about it. Some
of them are old enough to worry over it. Why you're a poet, Mickey!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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