“Do you bring wood all the way from there on your back?”

“When I get some.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

The child looked at him steadily, and then in a strange somewhat softened manner which belied her words, answered,

“No.”

“You don’t bring that big basket full, do you?”

She kept her bright eyes on him and nodded.

“I should think it would break your back.”

“If I don’t break my back I get a lickin’.”

“Was that what you were crying for as you went by?”

“I wa’n’t a cryin’!” said the girl.  “Nobody never see me a cryin’ for nothin’!”

“You haven’t filled your basket to-day.”

She gave an askant look into it, and was silent.

“How came that?”

“’Cause! —­ I was tired, and I hadn’t had no dinner; and I don’t care!  That’s why I wished the thunder would kill me.  I can’t live without eatin’.”

“Have you had nothing since morning?”

“I don’t get no mornin’ —­ I have to get my dinner.”

“And you could get none to-day?”

“No.  Everything was eat up.”

“Everything isn’t quite eaten up,” said Winthrop, rummaging in his coat pocket; and he brought forth thence a paper of figs which he gave the girl.  “He isn’t so short of means as I feared, after all,” thought Elizabeth, “since he can afford to carry figs about in his pocket.”  But she did not know that the young gentleman had made his own dinner off that paper of figs; and she could not guess it, ever when from his other coat pocket he produced some biscuits which were likewise given to eke out the figs in the little black girl’s dinner.  She was presently roused to very great marvelling again by seeing him apply his foot to another box, one without a clean side, and roll it over half the length of the shed for the child to sit upon.

“What do you think of life now, Miss Elizabeth?” he said, leaving his charge to eat her figs and coming again to the young lady’s side.

“That isn’t life,” said Elizabeth.

“It seems without the one quarter of agreeableness,” he said.

“But it’s horrible, Mr. Winthrop! —­”

He was silent, and looked at the girl, who sitting on her coal box was eating figs and biscuits with intense satisfaction.

“She is not a bad-looking child,” said Elizabeth.

“She is a very good-looking child,” said Winthrop; “at least her face has a great deal of intelligence; and I think, something more.”

“What more?”

“Feeling, or capacity of feeling.”

“I wish you had a seat, Mr. Landholm,” said Elizabeth, looking round.

“Thank you —­ I don’t wish for one.”

“It was very vexatious in Rose to go and leave me!”

“There isn’t another box for her if she had stayed,” said Winthrop.

“She would have me go out with her this afternoon to see her dressmaker, who lives just beyond here a little; and father had the horses.  It was so pleasant an afternoon, I had no notion of a storm.”