Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/309

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

be free to flirt round and enjoy herself, and the child bein' over-excited and couldn't sleep she dosed her double and treble. 'Tennyrate, she gin her so much that the next mornin' they found her pretty little body layin' cold and still, the sweet, misused sperit gone clear out of it. Escaped! that's the way my mind pictured it to myself as I thought it over with the paper dropped into my lap and the tears runnin' down my face entirely onbeknown to me.

Escaped! away from these bleak skies into a safer, happier realm. The nurse run away when she discovered it, but wuz brung back by officers of the law. Miss Greene Smythe went into spazzum after spazzum, coniption fit after coniption fit, but recovered enough to testify aginst the girl and send her to prison. The next work she did wuz to dismiss the other girl and hire a good, middle-aged woman, widder of a Lutherean minister, to take care of Algernon.

Well, I don't envy that widder not a mite. But no missionary to Africa nor India's coral strand wuz ever needed more, and mebby she will disseminate some gospel and some common sense into the benighted jungles of Miss Greene Smythe's mind. 'Tennyrate, I hearn, it come quite straight too—Nancy Yerden hearn it from her sister-in-law in Jonesville and she told me—that them Danglers didn't dangle nigh so much, Miss Greene Smythe seemin' to not want 'em to.

But she left for the city a few weeks after little Angenora's death; she said she couldn't bear the associations connected with that house, and I hear she pays more attention to Mr. Greene Smythe than she did; howsumever, I don't know. Thomas J. gets bizness letters from her occasionally—I guess he'll git her free