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CHAPTER I.
N
umber five!" called out shrilly and impatiently the saleswoman at the lace counter in a great dry-goods establishment. The call was repeated in a still more impatient tone before there was any response; then there rushed up a girl of ten or eleven, whose big black eyes looked forth fearlessly, some people said impudently, from a little peaked face, so thin and small that it seemed all eyes, and in the neighborhood where the child lived she was often nicknamed "Eyes."
"Why didn't you come when you were first called?" asked the saleswoman, angrily.
"Couldn't; I'se waitin' for somethin'," answered the child, coolly.
"You were staring at and list'nin' to those ladies at the ribbon counter; I saw you," retorted the saleswoman.
"Well, I tole yer, I'se waitin' for somethin'," the girl answered, showing two rows of teeth in a mischievous grin.
A younger saleswoman, standing near, giggled.
"Don't laugh at her, Lizzie," rebuked the elder; "she's getting too big for her boots with her impudence."
"They ain't boots; they're shoes." And a thin little leg was thrust forward to show a foot encased in a shabby old shoe much too large for it.
Then, like a flash, the "imp," as the saleswoman often termed her, seized the parcel that was ready for her, and darted off with it.
"You'll get reported if you don't look out," the saleswoman called after her.
The "imp" turned her head and winked back at the irritated saleswoman in such a grotesque fashion that the lively Lizzie giggled again, for which she was told she ought to be ashamed of herself. Good-natured Lizzie admitted the truth of this accusation, but declared that Becky was so funny she "just couldn't help laughing."
"You call it 'funny,'" the other exclaimed; " I call it impudence. She ain't afraid of anything or anybody. Look at her now! there she is back at the ribbon counter. I wonder what those swells are talking about, that she's so taken up with. She's up to some mischief, I'll bet you, Lizzie."
"I guess it's only her fun. She's going to take 'em off by 'n' by," said Lizzie.
This was one of the "imp's" accomplishments,—taking people off. She was a great mimic, and on rainy days when the girls ate their luncheon in the room that the firm had allotted to them for that purpose, Miss Becky would "take off," the various people that had come under her keen observation during the day. "Private theatricals," the lively Lizzie called this "taking off," as Becky strutted and minced, with her chin up, her dress lifted in one hand, while with the other she held a pair of scissors for an eyeglass, and peered through the bows at a piece of cloth, which she picked and pecked and commented upon in fine-lady fashion,—"just like the swells," Lizzie declared. It was quite natural then for her to conclude that it was fun of this sort that Becky was "up to," in her close attention to the "swell" customers at the ribbon counter. "She was studyin' 'em, just as actresses study their play-parts," Lizzie thought to herself; and half an hour later, when she met Becky in the lunch-room, she called out to her,—
"Come, Becky, give us the swells at the ribbon counter."
"Eh?" said Becky.
Lizzie repeated her request, and the other girls joined in: "Yes, Becky, give us the swells at the ribbon counter; we want some fun."
"They warn't funny," answered Becky, shortly.
"Oh! now, Becky, what'd you stand there lis'nin' and lookin' at 'em so long for?"
"'Cause they were sayin' somethin' I wanted to hear."
"Of course they were. What was it about, Becky?"
"May-day, flowers and queens and baskets."
"Oh, my! Well, tell us how they said it, Becky."
"I tole yer they warn't funny; they warn't o' that kind that peeks through them long stick glasses and puckers up their lips. They talked straight 'long, and said very int'restin' things," said Becky.
"Well, tell us; tell us what 'twas," exclaimed Lizzie.
"Oh, you wouldn't care for what they's talkin' 'bout. They warn't sayin' anythin' 'bout beaux or clothes," Becky replied with a grin.
A shout of laughter went up from the rest of the company, who all knew the lively Lizzie's favorite topics. Lizzie joined in the laugh, and cried good-naturedly,—
"Never mind, Becky, if I'm not up to your ribbon swells talk; tell us about it."
"Oh, yes! tell us, tell us!" echoed the others.
Becky took a bite out of a slice of bread, and munching it slowly, said,—
"I tole yer once 't was 'bout May-day and flowers and queens and baskets."
"What May-day? There's thirty-one of 'em, Becky."
Becky looked staggered for a moment. In her little hard-worked life she had had small opportunity to learn much out of books, and she had never happened to hear this rhyming bit:—
"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone."
Recovering her wits, however, very speedily, she said coolly,—
"The first pleasant one."
"Well, what were they telling about it? What were they going to do the first pleasant day in May?"
"They didn't say as they was goin' to do anythin'; they was tellin'—or one of 'em was tellin' t' other one—what folks did when they's little, and afore that, hundreds o' years ago, how the folks then used to get all the children together and go out in the country and put up a great big high pole, and put a lot o' flowers on a string and wind 'em roun' the pole; and then all the children would take hold o' han's and dance roun' the pole, and one o' the children was chose to be queen, and had a crown made o' flowers on her head, and the rest o' the children minded her."
"You'd like that ,—to be queen and have the rest mind you, Becky, wouldn't you?" laughed one of the company.
"I bet I would," owned Becky, frankly.
"But what about the baskets?" asked somebody else.
"Oh, the kids," said Becky, forgetting in her present absorbed interest the term "children,"—which she had learned to use since she had come up daily from the poor neighborhood where she lived,—"the kids use to fill a basket with flowers and hang it on the door-knob of somebody's house,—somebody they knew,—and then ring the bell and run. Golly! guess I should hev to hang it inside where I lives. I couldn't hang it on no outside door and hev it stay there long,—them thieves o' alley boys would git it 'fore yer could turn. I guess, though, they was country kids who used to hang 'em; but the lady said she was goin' to try to start 'em up again here in the city."
"What kind o' baskets were they?" asked Lizzie, suddenly sitting up with a new air of attention.
"Oh, ho!" laughed one of the girls; "Lizzie wants to hang a basket for somebody she knows!"
"Hush up!" said Lizzie, turning rather red. Then, addressing Becky again: "Did the lady who was telling about 'em have a basket with her? Did you see it?"
"No, but she hed a piece o' that pretty wrinkly paper jes' like the lamp-shades in the winders, and she said the baskets was made o' that, and she was buyin' some ribbon to match for handles and bows."
"Oh, I wish I could see one of 'em," said Lizzie.
"I went to a kinnergarden school wonst when I was a little kid," struck in Becky here, "and we was put up there to makin' baskets out o' paper."
"Could you do it now?" asked Lizzie, eagerly.
"Mebbe I could," answered Becky, warily; "but it's a good bit ago."
"When you were young," cried one of the company with a giggle.
"Yes, when I was young," repeated Becky, in exact imitation of the speaker, whose voice was very flat and nasal.
Everybody laughed, and one of the girls cried: "Becky'll get the best of you any time." They were all of them impressed with this fact, when, a few minutes after, the wary Becky agreed to show Lizzie what she knew of "kinnergarden" basket-making, if Lizzie would agree to pay her for her trouble by giving her materials enough to make a basket for herself.
"Ain't she a sharp one?" commented one of the girls to another when they had left the lunch-room.
"Ain't she, though? She'll get what she can, and hold on to what she's got every time."
"But she's awful good fun. Didn't she take off Matty Kelley's flat nose-y way of talkin' to a T?"
"Didn't she!" and the two girls laughed anew at the recollection.