“Yes, mem.”

“What does your father do?”

Baubie Wishart glanced down again in thought for an instant, then raised her eyes for the first time directly to her questioner’s face:  “He used to be a Christy man, but he canna be that any longer, sae he goes wi’ boords.”

“Why cannot he be a Christy man any longer?”

Down came the foot once more, and this time took up its position permanently beside the other:  “Because mother drinks awfu’, an’ pawned the banjo for drink.”  This family history was related in the most matter-of-fact, natural way.

“And does your father drink too?” asked Miss Mackenzie after a short pause.

Baubie Wishart’s eyes wandered all round the room, and with one toe she swept up a little mass of dust before she answered in a voice every tone of which spoke unwilling truthfulness, “Just whiles—­Saturday nichts.”

“Is he kind to you?”

“Ay,” looking up quickly, “excep’ just whiles when he’s fou—­Saturday nichts, ye ken—­and then he beats me; but he’s rale kind when he’s sober.”

“Were you ever at school?”

“No, mem,” with a shake of the head that seemed to convey that she had something else, and probably better, to do.

“Did you ever hear of God?” asked the lady who had brought her.

“Ay, mem,” answered Baubie quite readily:  “it’s a kind of a bad word I hear in the streets.”

“How old are you?” asked both ladies simultaneously.

“Thirteen past,” replied Baubie, with a promptness that made her listeners smile, suggesting as it did the thought that the question had been put to her before, and that Baubie knew well the import of her answer.

She grew more communicative now.  She could not read, but, all the same, she knew two songs which she sang in the streets—­“Before the Battle” and “After the Battle;” and, carried away by the thought of her own powers, she actually began to give proof of her assertion by reciting one of them there and then.  This, however, was stopped at once.  “Can knit too,” she added then.

“Who taught you to knit?”

“Don’ know.  Wis at a Sunday-schuil too.”

“Oh, you were?  And what did you learn there?”

Baubie Wishart looked puzzled, consulted her toes in vain, and then finally gave it up.

“I should like to do something for her,” observed her first friend:  “it is time this street-singing came to an end.”

“She is intelligent, clearly,” said Miss Mackenzie, looking curiously at the child, whose appearance and bearing rather puzzled her.  There was not a particle of the professional street-singer about Baubie Wishart, the child of that species being generally clean-washed, or at least soapy, of face, with lank, smooth-combed and greasy hair; and usually, too, with a smug, sanctimonious air of meriting a better fate.  Baubie Wishart presented none of these characteristics:  her face was simply filthy; her hair was a red-brown, loosened tangle that reminded one painfully of oakum in its first stage.  And she looked as if she deserved a whipping, and defied it too.  She was just a female arab—­an arab plus an accomplishment—­bright, quick and inconsequent as a sparrow, and reeking of the streets and gutters, which had been her nursery.