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Emilie Foster
The Haven Children; or, Frolics at the Funny Old House on Funny Street
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338083821
Table of Contents
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CHAPTER II.
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“I pray you hear my song of this nest,
For it is not long.”
I suppose I must follow the fashion of all story-tellers, and introduce my young readers to the Haven family, one by one. I grant it is rather tiresome, but you know, the first thing in the study of grammar is to get some knowledge of all the little parts which make up the great Family of Speech; so, in your Geography, you must make the separate acquaintance of little streams and bays as well as of great rivers and oceans, tiny capes, huge promontories, and continents, before you can have much idea of the great world; so, in every-day life, we get on better, and feel much more at our ease with new acquaintances, after we have learned something about them, so I will begin by telling you that Mr. and Mrs. Havens lived in a brown stone house on Madison avenue, and if you had chanced to pass Forty-second street early some Spring morning, and looked up to the third story windows of one of the houses on your left, you, most likely, would have seen six little faces looking out, six little noses and six pairs of chubby cheeks flattened against the window-panes, earnestly studying the movements of that little girl in soiled dress. Poor child! her tatters, flapping apart with the motion of the warm south wind, show two thin, stockingless, shoeless legs, telling a tale of want and neglect at home, as her little iron hook clinks against the curb-stones, seeking to find hidden treasures of rags or bread-crust to fill the bag she bears. Do you guess why the thin, soiled, childish face looks up so earnestly at the window of No. 310, as she passes? It is because there she finds the one little rift of cheer which steals into the poor heart, the day long. Child as she is, knowing nothing of a true home and mother’s tenderness, she reads, with a child’s instinct, the sympathy and companionship in those bright young faces, and well remembers how, early every Sunday morning, a little basket is let down from those windows filled with nice bits which the children have saved from their Saturday’s dinner and Sunday’s breakfast, gifts costing them often a little self-denial, for which they are well repaid by the bright look in the girl’s face as she draws out the apple or the orange which, yesterday, was handled over so many times, and wistfully gazed at before its owner could quite willingly consign it to the little basket. Can you not see, now, why Papa and Mamma, gazing from the windows, regard that poor child’s bag with so much interest, nay, almost reverence? They feel as if, somehow, it became the little altar on which, each Lord’s day, their dear ones offered up their gifts of that which had cost them something of self-denial, and they prayed that the Holy Dove might ever nestle in their young hearts, prompting to love and kindly deeds which, offered to those little neglected city waifs, is indeed offered to Him who has said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these little ones, ye have done it unto Me.”