Little Citizens | Page 6

house und his three sewing machines. All, all burned!"
"Oh, dear me!" said Teacher. "Your poor uncle! Now he can never pay
that thousand dollars."
Sadie regarded Teacher with puzzled eyes.
"Sure he pays. He's now 'most as rich like Van'pilt. I guess he's got a
hundred dollers. He pays all right, all right, und my papa had a party
over him: he had such a awful glad!"
"Glad on your uncle?" cried Teacher, startled into colloquialisms.
"Yiss ma'an. Und my mamma has a glad on Eva's mamma, und my
gran'ma has a glad on both of papas und both of mammas, und my
gran'pa has a glad just like my gran'ma. All, all glad!"
As Teacher walked towards Grand Street that afternoon, she met a
radiant little girl with a small and most unsteady boy in tow. She
recognized Eva and surmised the cousin whose coldness had hurt her
even unto tears.
"Well, Eva, and what little boy is this?" she asked.
And the beaming and transformed Eva answered:
"It's my little cousin. He's lovin' mit me now. Sadie, too, is lovin'. I take
him out the while it's healthy he walks, on'y he ain't so big und he falls.
Say, Teacher, it's nice when he falls. I holds him in my hands."
And fall he did. Eva picked him up, greatly to their mutual delight, and
explained:
"He's heavy, und my this here arm ain't yet so healthy, but I hold him in
my hands the while he's cousins mit me, und over cousins I'm got all
times that kind feelin'."

THE USES OF ADVERSITY

"I guess I don't need I should go on the school," announced Algernon
Yonowsky.
"I guess you do," said his sister.
"I guess I don't need I should go on the school, neither," remarked
Percival.
"You got to go," Leah informed her mutinous brothers. "I got a permit
for you from off the Principal; he's friends mit me the while I goes on
that school when I was little. You got to go on the school, und you got
to stay on the school. It's awful nice how you learn things there."
But the prospect did not appeal to the Yonowsky twins. It seemed to
forbode restraint and, during their six tempestuous years, they had
followed their own stubborn ways and had accepted neither advice nor
rebuke from any man. The evening of the day which had seen their
birth had left Leah motherless, and her father broken of heart and of
ambition. Since then Mr. Yonowsky had grown daily more silent and
morose, and Leah had been less and less able to cope with "them devil
boys."
A room high up in a swarming tenement had been the grave of her
youth and pleasure. She was as solitary there as she could have been in
a desert, for the neighbours who had known and assisted her in the first
years of her bereavement had died or moved to that Mecca of the New
World, Harlem. And their successors were not kindly disposed towards
a family comprising a silent man, a half-grown girl, and two twin
demons who made the block a terror to the nervous and the stairs a
menace to the unwary. No one came to gossip with Leah. She was too
young to listen understandingly to older women's adventures in
sickness or domestic infelicity, and too dispirited to make any show of
interest in the toilettes or "affaires" of the younger. For what were
incompetent doctors, habit-backed dresses, wavering husbands, or

impetuous lovers to Leah Yonowsky, who had assumed all the
responsibilities of a woman's life with none of its consolations?
Of course she had, to some extent, failed in the upbringing of her
brothers, but she had always looked forward hopefully to the time when
they should be old enough to be sent to school. There they should learn,
among much other lore, to live up to the names she had selected for
them out of the book of love and of adventure which she had been
reading at the time of their baptism. During all the years of her
enslavement she had been a patron of the nearest public library, and it
had been a source of great disappointment to her that Algernon and
Percival had made no least attempt to acquire the grace of speech and
manner which she had learned to associate with those lordly titles.
And now they were refusing even to approach the Pierian Spring! "I
guess I don't go," Algernon was persisting. "I guess I plays on the
street."
"Me, too," added Percival. "Patrick Brennan he goes on that school und
he gives me over yesterday, a bloody nose. I don' need I should go on
no school mit somebody what makes like that