“She doesn’t mean to be naughty; you must scuse her,” spoke up Dotty, very loud; for she still held unconsciously to the idea that blind people must have dull ears.  “She is a nice baby; but I s’pose you don’t know there are some play-houses in this yard, and she’ll get into mischief if I don’t watch her.”

“Why, all these play-houses are ours,” said little curly-haired Emily; “whose did you think they were?”

“Yours?” asked Dotty, in surprise; “can you play?”

Emily laughed merrily.

“Why not?  Did you think we were sick?”

Dotty did not answer.

“I am Mrs. Holiday,” added Emily; “that is, I generally am; but sometimes I’m Jane.  Didn’t you ever read Rollo on the Atlantic?”

Dotty, who could only stammer over the First Reader at her mother’s knee, was obliged to confess that she had never made Rollo’s acquaintance.

“We have books read to us,” said Emily.  “In the work-hour we go into the sitting-room, and there we sit with the bead-boxes in our laps, making baskets, and then our teacher reads to us out of a book, or tells us a story.”

“That is very nice,” said Dotty; “people don’t read to me much.”

“No, of course not, because you can see.  People are kinder to blind children—­didn’t you know it?  I’m glad I had my eyes put out, for if they hadn’t been put out I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Where should you have gone, then?”

“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere; I should just have staid at home.”

“Don’t you like to stay at home?”

Emily shrugged her shoulders.

“My paw killed a man.”

“I don’t know what a paw is,” said Dotty.

“O, Flyaway Clifford, you’ve broken a teapot!”

“No matter,” said Emily, kindly; “’twas made out of a gone-to-seed poppy.  Don’t you know what a paw is?  Why, it’s a paw”

In spite of this clear explanation, Dotty did not understand any better than before.

“It was the man that married my maw, only maw died, and then there was another one, and she scolded and shook me.”

“O, I s’pose you mean a father ’n mother; now I know.”

“I want to tell you,” pursued Emily, who loved to talk to strangers.  “She didn’t care if I was blind; she used to shake me just the same.  And my paw had fits.”

The other children, who had often heard this story, did not listen to it with great interest, but went on with their various plays, leaving Emily and Dotty standing together before Emily’s baby-house.

“Yes, my paw had fits.  I knew when they were coming, for I could smell them in the bottle.”

“Fits in a bottle!”

“It was something he drank out of a bottle that made him have the fits.  You are so little that you couldn’t understand.  And then he was cross.  And once he killed a man; but he didn’t go to.”

“Then he was guilty,” said Dotty, in a solemn tone.  “Did they take him to the court-house and hang him?”