Faith Gartneys Girlhood | Page 6

a pint pot, and there bid him drum.'"
"No," said Faith, half seriously, and half teased out of her seriousness.
"It's nothing of that sort. At least," she added, glancing over the lines
again, "I don't think it means anything like that."

And Faith laid down the book, and went upstairs for a word with her
mother.
Aunt Henderson, who had been brought up in times when all the doings
of young girls were strictly supervised, and who had no high-flown
scruples, because she had no mean motives, deliberately walked over
and fetched the elegant little volume from the table, reseated herself in
her armchair--felt for her glasses, and set them carefully upon her
nose--and, as her grandniece returned, was just finishing her perusal of
the freshly inscribed lines.
"Humph! A good fortune. Only you've got to earn it."
"Yes," said Faith, quite gravely. "And I don't see how. There doesn't
seem to be much that I can do."
"Just take hold of the first thing that comes in your way. If the Lord's
got anything bigger to give you, he'll see to it. There's your mother's
mending basket brimful of stockings."
Faith couldn't help laughing. Presently she grew grave again.
"Aunt Henderson," said she, abruptly, "I wish something would happen
to me. I get tired of living sometimes. Things don't seem worth while."
Aunt Henderson bent her head slightly, and opened her eyes wide over
the tops of her glasses.
"Don't say that again," said she. "Things happen fast enough. Don't you
dare to tempt Providence."
"Providence won't be tempted, nor misunderstand," replied Faith, an
undertone of reverence qualifying her girlish repartee. "He knows just
what I mean."
"She's a queer child," said Aunt Faith to herself, afterwards, thinking
over the brief conversation. "She'll be something or nothing, I always
said. I used to think 'twould be nothing."

CHAPTER IV.
GLORY McWHIRK.
"There's beauty waiting to be born, And harmony that makes no sound;
And bear we ever, unawares, A glory that hath not been crowned."
Shall I try to give you a glimpse of quite another young life than Faith
Gartney's? One looking also vaguely, wonderingly, for "something to
happen"--that indefinite "something" which lies in everybody's future,
which may never arrive, and yet which any hour may bring?
Very little likelihood there has ever seemed for any great joy to get into
such a life as this has been, that began, or at least has its earliest
memory and association, in the old poorhouse at Stonebury.
A child she was, of five years, when she was taken in there with her old,
crippled grandmother.
Peter McWhirk was picked up dead, from the graveled drive of a
gentleman's place, where he had been trimming the high trees that
shaded it. An unsound limb--a heedless movement--and Peter went
straight down, thirty feet, and out of life. Out of life, where he had a
trim, comfortable young wife--one happy little child, for whom skies
were as blue, and grass as green, and buttercups as golden as for the
little heiress of Elm Hill, who was riding over the lawn in her basket
wagon, when Peter met his death there--the hope, also, of another that
was to come.
Rosa McWhirk and her baby of a day old were buried the week after,
together; and then there was nothing left for Glory and her helpless
grandmother but the poorhouse as a present refuge; and to the one
death, that ends all, and to the other a life of rough and unremitting
work to look to for by and by.
When Glory came into this world where wants begin with the first
breath, and go on thickening around us, and pressing upon us until the
last one is supplied to us--a grave--she wanted, first of all, a name.

"Sure what'll I call the baby?" said the proud young mother to the ladies
from the white corner house, where she had served four faithful years
of her maidenhood, and who came down at once with comforts and
congratulations. "They've sint for the praist, an' I've niver bethought of
a name. I made so certain 'twould be a boy!"
"What a funny bit of a thing it is!" cried the younger of the two visitors,
turning back the bedclothes a little from the tiny, red, puckered face,
with short, sandy-colored hair standing up about the temples like a fuzz
ball.
"I'd call her Glory. There's a halo round her head like the saints in the
pictures."
"Sure, that's jist like yersilf, Miss Mattie!" exclaimed Rosa, with a faint,
merry little laugh. "An' quare enough, I knew a lady once't of the very
name, in the ould country. Miss Gloriana O'Dowd she was; an' the
beauty o' County Kerry. My Lady Kinawley, she came to be. 'Deed, but
I'd like