One of her shoe-button eyes dangled by a linen
thread in a blood-curdling sort of way; her nose, which had been a pink
glass bead, was now a mere spot, ambiguously located. Her red worsted
lips were sadly raveled, but that she did not regret, "for it was
kissin' as done it." Her yarn hair was attached to her head with
safety-pins, and her internal organs intruded themselves on the public
through a gaping wound in the side. Never mind! if you have any
curiosity to measure the strength of the ideal, watch a child with her
oldest doll. Rags sat at the head of the dinner-table, and had taken the
precaution to get the headless doll on his right, with a view to eating
her gingerbread as well as his own,--doing no violence to the
proprieties in this way, but rather concealing her defects from a
carping public.
"I tell you sompfin' ittle Mit Vildy Tummins," Gay was saying to her
battered offspring. "You 's doin' to have a new ittle sit-ter
to-mowowday, if you 's a dood ittle dirl an does to seep nite an kick,
you _ser-weet_ ittle Vildy Tummins!" (All this punctuated with ardent
squeezes fraught with delicious agony to one who had a wound in her
side!) "Vay fink you 's worn out, 'weety, but we know you isn't, don'
we, 'weety? An I'll tell you nite ittle tory to-night, tause you isn't
seepy. Wunt there was a ittle day hen 'at tole a net an' laid fir-teen
waw edds in it, an bime bye erleven or seventeen ittle chits f'ew out of
'em, an Mit Vildy 'dopted 'em all! In 't that a nite tory, you
_ser-weet_ ittle Mit Vildy Tummins?"
Samantha hardly knew why the tears should spring to her eyes as she
watched the dinner party,--unless it was because we can scarcely look at
little children in their unconscious play without a sort of sadness,
partly of pity and partly of envy, and of longing too, as for something
lost and gone.
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