“But, Sarah Sue,” I said, after I’d read it, “you’ve got seventy-five cents down here for your mother and only fifty for your father.  Do you think it’s right to make a difference?”

“Yes, I do.”  And Sarah Sue’s big brown eyes were as serious as if ’twere funeral flowers she was selecting.  “You see, it’s this way.  I love them both seventy-five cents’ worth, but I don’t think I ought to give them the same.  Father is just my father by marriage, but Mother’s my mother by bornation.  I think mothers ought always to have the most.”

I think so, too.

IX

LOVE IS BEST

Christmas is over.  I feel like the parlor grate when the fire has gone out.

But it was a grand Christmas, the grandest we’ve ever known.  It came on Christmas Day.  From the time we got up until we went to bed we were so happy we forgot we were Charity children; and no matter whatever happens, we’ve got one beautiful time to look back on.

Miss Katherine says a beautiful memory is a possession no one can take from you, and it’s one of the best possessions you can have.  I think so, too.  She’s made all my memories.  All.  I mean the precious ones.

Everybody in this Orphan Asylum had a present from somebody outside.  Even me, who might as well be that man in the Bible, Melchesey something, who didn’t have beginning or end, or any relations.

I had fourteen from outside.  Some I hid, because I didn’t want the girls to know, several not getting more than one, and hardly any more than three or four.

Those who had the heart to give them didn’t have the money, and those who had the money didn’t have the heart.  Being so busy with their own they forgot to remember, and if it hadn’t been for Miss Katherine and her friends this last Christmas would have been like all others.

Her Army brother’s wife sent a box full of all sorts of pretty Indian things, she being in the wild West near the Indians who made them.  And she sent ten dolls, all dressed, for the ten youngest girls.

She is awful busy, having three children and not much money; but Miss Katherine says busy people make time, and those who have most to do, do more still.

She sent me the darlingest little bedroom slippers with fur all around the top.  And in them she put a little note that made me cry and cry and cry, it was so dear and mothery.  I don’t know what made me cry, but I couldn’t help it.  I couldn’t.

She doesn’t know me except from what Miss Katherine writes, and I wonder why she wrote that note.  But everybody is good to me—­that is, nearly everybody.

It certainly makes a difference in your backbone when people are kind and when they are not.  I don’t believe unkindness and misfortune and suffering will ever make me good.  If anybody is mean to me, I’m stifferer than a lamp-post, and you couldn’t make me cry.  But when any one is good to me, I haven’t a bit of firmness, and am no better than a caterpillar.