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Updated: June 19, 2025
Wherever Aunt Cheerie was, the children were sure to be; and so there was Sunbeam, knife in hand, and Fairy, cutting a paring something less than half an inch thick, while the dear little Chicken was wiping apples for the others to pare, and little Tow-head, baby-brother, was trying to upset the peach-box, in which were a couple of pet chickens, that were hatched out too late, and that had to be kept in-doors to secure them from Jack Frost.
Little could he know of death but he knew he had no baby-brother now, and his mother told him Charley was in heaven. "I hope, mother," said he, "the apostles will not get him." "Why, my child?" "Because they did not want little children to go to Jesus," was his artless reply. This little boy has recently removed, with his parents, to the city.
The latter had mourned, through all these years, that she knew not what had become of her baby-brother, whom she well remembered and loved; but here he was, nineteen years of age, a manly, noble, Christian young man! Could she believe her eyes? Could we, who were lookers on, think it real? We received the story of his life from his own lips.
The two great wide streets, High-street and Butcher-row, intersecting one another in the form of a cross: the two churches the Old Church, gloomy and Norman, with its ghostly graveyard; and the New Church, shining white amidst a pleasant garden cemetery, beneath one of whose flower-beds her baby-brother lay: the two shops, the only ones she ever visited, the confectioner's, where she stood to watch the yearly fair, and the bookseller's whither she dragged her nurse on any excuse, that she might pore over its incalculable treasures.
Then the teacher leads us across the street to the two Moslem classes, and we cannot tell the difference between them and the Christian children, except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and the recitation of "The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one blind girl who recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about ten years carries her baby-brother in her arms.
It might be in truth a warning to him to guard his ways a voice from the twin-brother, to be with him through life. She knelt down by him, and kissed his forehead. 'Dear Gilbert, she said, 'we all shall die. 'Yes, but I shall die young. 'And if you should. Those are happy who die young. How much pain your baby-brother and sisters have missed! How happy Edmund is now!
In the hollow-cheeked, large-eyed girl of ten, whom I saw giving a cheerless oversight to her baby-brother, I did not so much marvel at it. She had merely come a little earlier than usual to the perception of what was to be her business in life.
I had a dashing barouche of my own, and was rolling in conscious grandeur past my step-mother's window, with the back of my expensive bonnet turned towards the half-closed shutter, through which she was sure to be peering enviously when the laths of the very shutter in question were shaken impatiently, and a hasty, authoritative voice cried out, "If you've nothing else to do but spoil your new pink frock out there, Amelia Hampden, I wish you would come in and play with your baby-brother for awhile;" and then, as the blind and voice were lowered, I heard the usual "enough to provoke a saint," which was the finishing touch to every reprimand I either did, or did not, deserve.
It wasn't my own money, and I'd no business to, but I was so sorry for the little boy and his mother and his darling baby-brother. The money belonged to some one else." "Who?" Mrs. Bax asked ere she had time to remember the excellent Australian rule about not asking questions. And H.O. blurted out, "It was Miss Sandal's money every penny," before we could stop him.
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