Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/182

172 afterward, when she talked with me about it, she cried so, that I never said another word about a sister to her till she died. But I remember I said to her then: "I know I 'll have a sister some day! I know I will! You see if I don't! How can you be so sure God never will give me one? And now, you see, I have got one."

Yes! It was indeed as if Ally had been dropped out of the skies into Jim's hands. We were her only friends in the country,—so far as we knew, in the world,—and all that she could tell us of herself was that she was eleven years old, and that her name was Alice Fisher.

She was a marvelous child. Mrs. Bunker's homely words told the exact truth of her; they came to my mind constantly in the course of our first days at the parsonage. "She 's jest like a lamb, and yit there ain't nothin' stoopid about her." She obeyed, with an instant and pathetic docility, the slightest suggestion from any one of us; she rarely made a movement of her own accord. Wherever we placed her, whatever we gave her to do, there she stayed; with that thing she continued to occupy herself until some one proposed a change.

This was the result of the long patience she had learned in her sad years of solitude and confinement. But her eager brown eyes watched with intensest interest everything that happened within her sight, and no word that was spoken escaped her attention. At family prayers, while the Bible was