The dwarfed boy was Nancy's peculiar care among the Burnside people, and the question as to why he was made "crookit," as she called it, was one which I had never been able to answer to her satisfaction. Coming in one day with a little bunch of violets for me, she stopped before leaving the room, and said, as though telling me a funny secret: "Jamie Henderlin took Nancy's money." "What?" I cried. "Yes," she said, "took it out of the little bag when he thought I was not looking." "What did you do?" I inquired. "I?" she turned away shyly, "I made out that I didn't see him." "But, Nancy," I said, "that was not really kind. As he grows older he will steal." "Take," she interrupted firmly. "He will take from other people." "He is a dwarf, Jock," she said, with a sweet irrelevance, which had its logic, however, in her kind heart. "That doesn't make it right." "He wanted it more than I did," she went on; "I don't need it----" "That doesn't excuse him, either." "Perhaps," she said, "if you and I, mine Jock, were made as he is we might do something worse than he has done. _People laugh at him!_ He mayn't be right. I'm not saying that he is right; but I _am_ saying that _I_ am not going to hurt his feelings. The Lord has done that enough already." And the third one, never told by Mrs. Opie, and a fortunate thing it was for us, had to do with her skill in the use of a pen. She was still a very little child, lying on a rug by the fire, reading out of the Bible, as I sat at the desk looking over some accounts which would not come right. There was the matter of a draft for five pounds, with my own name to it, which I had certainly no remembrance of ever having signed. "What's the matter, Jock?" said Nancy, seeing my knit brow. "They won't come right, Little Flower," I answered. She came over to me and looked at the accounts. "Nancy made one just like Jock's," she said. "What?" I cried, with consternation. "Nancy--made--one--just--like--Jock's," she repeated. "A poor lady who was very sick," she explained, "was by here one day you had gone. I made one for her." "Nancy," I said, taking her on my knee, "do you know that it is a crime to sign another person's name without his leave?" "How crime?" "Well, it's the thing people get locked in jails for----" She laughed out loud and lay back on my arm at this. "It's all mine, isn't it?" she asked. I had told this so often that I couldn't gainsay it. "_Wrong to write Sandy's name, not wrong to write Jock's_," she crooned in a sort of song; and this was as far as I got with her concerning it. I told Sandy these three tales, and he roared with glee. "Her morals are all tail first," he said, "though very sound! But she'll have us in the poor farm and herself in jail if she keeps this up." CHAPTER VII I TAKE NANCY'S EDUCATION IN HAND