Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/27

Rh because I was doing things for her all the time, but she got to calling me 'sponger' and 'brat' and 'poor-house trash,' and said in the South they would call me 'po' kin.' And Daddy got as mad as fire and up and told her to stop. I would have gone away if there had been any place to go to, but Mrs. O'Shea was off burying some of her folks and I just had to stay, so I crawled way down in a crack back under the eaves of the studio and I stayed there, but I could hear them quarreling. She told Daddy he could 'choose between us,' and he said, 'Melodramatic nonsense!' And she told him there were other men of her acquaintance quite as attractive as he was. He said, 'No doubt! You are quite welcome to choose between us, or rather among us.' You see Daddy was mighty particular about his English," said the child proudly. She rattled on:

"Then he persuaded me to come out from the crack where I was hiding, and smoothed my hair and kissed me, and made me wash my face, and we got on the subway and went out to see where Edgar Allan Poe lived in a cunning little cottage, but when Poe lived there it was country with green fields and a little stream of water. Now there is nothing but a great sewer where the stream used to be, and all the fields are