I wish with all my heart some artist would paint me Lois and her cart!  Mr. Kitts, the artist in the city then, used to see it going past his room out by the coal-pits every day, and thought about it seriously.  But he had his grand battle-piece on hand then,—­and after that he went the way of all geniuses, and died down into colorer for a photographer.  He met them, that day, out by the stone quarry, and touched his hat as he returned Lois’s “Good-morning,” and took a couple of great papaws from her.  She was a woman, you see, and he had some of the schoolmaster’s old-fashioned notions about women.  He was a sickly-looking soul.  One day Lois had heard him say that there were papaws on his mother’s place in Ohio; so after that she always brought him some every day.  She was one of those people who must give, if it is nothing better than a Kentucky banana.

After they passed the stone quarry, they left the country behind them, going down the stubble-covered hills that fenced in the town.  Even in the narrow streets, and through the warehouses, the strong, dewy air had quite blown down and off the fog and dust.  Morning (town morning, to be sure, but still morning) was shining in the red window-panes, in the tossing smoke up in the frosty air, in the very glowing faces of people hurrying from market with their noses nipped blue and their eyes watering with cold.  Lois and her cart, fresh with country breath hanging about them, were not so out of place, after all.  House-maids left the steps half-scrubbed, and helped her measure out the corn and beans, gossiping eagerly; the newsboys “Hi-d!” at her in a friendly, patronizing way; women in rusty black, with sharp, pale faces, hoisted their baskets, in which usually lay a scraggy bit of flitch, on to the wheel, their whispered bargaining ending oftenest in a low “Thank ye, Lois!”—­for she sold cheaper to some people than they did in the market.

Lois was Lois in town or country.  Some subtile power lay in the coarse, distorted body, in the pleading child’s face, to rouse, wherever they went, the same curious, kindly smile.  Not, I think, that dumb, pathetic eye, common to deformity, that cries, “Have mercy upon me, O my friend, for the hand of God hath touched me!”—­a deeper, mightier charm, rather:  a trust down in the fouled fragments of her brain, even in the bitterest hour of her bare, wretched life,—­a faith, faith in God, faith in her fellow-man, faith in herself.  No human soul refused to answer its summons.  Down in the dark alleys, in the very vilest of the black and white wretches that crowded sometimes about her cart, there was an undefined sense of pride in protecting this wretch whose portion of life was more meagre and low than theirs.  Something in them struggled up to meet the trust in the pitiful eyes,—­something which scorned to betray the trust,—­some Christ-like power, smothered, dying, under the filth of their life and the terror of hell.  Not lost.  If the Great Spirit of love and trust lives, not lost!