At
once her young niece was all animation.
"Oh, I wish I could go and hear you!" she sighed.
"Afraid you can't, Betsy," her aunt replied. And at this, with an
instinctive glance toward the door where her mother would soon come in to
stop by her mere presence all such conversation, Elizabeth eagerly threw
out one inquiry after the other, pell mell.
"How on earth do you do it?" she wanted to know. "How do you get a speech
ready, Aunt Deborah--how much of it do you write out ahead? Aren't you just
the least bit nervous--now, I mean--this minute? And how will you feel on
the platform? _What on earth do you do with your feet?_"
As the girl bent forward there with her gaze fixed ardently on her aunt,
her grandfather thought in half comic dismay, "Lord, now she'll want to be
a great speaker--like her aunt. And she will tell her mother so!"
"What's the meeting all about?" he inquired. And Deborah began to explain.
In her five schools the poverty was rapidly becoming worse. Each week more
children stayed away or came to school ragged and unkempt, some without any
overcoats, small pitiful mites wearing shoes so old as barely to stick on
their feet. And when the teachers and visitors followed these children into
their homes they found bare, dirty, chilly rooms where the little folk
shivered and wailed for food and the mothers looked distracted, gaunt and
sullen and half crazed. Over three hundred thousand workers were idle in
the city.
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