Chapter II: A Hard Day

KATY'S trials had only just begun.

After breakfast, Peter began to think about starting her in business, as he called it. So he took a look at her to see if she was "rigged right."

After quite a survey, he made up his mind that she was not, that she looked quite too well. Her shoes and stockings, though coarse, looked warm and comfortable; and her delaine dress, a dark brown, with red berries on it, Katy said, was not in the least like a beggar; neither was the little red hood nor the well-wadded scarlet cape, for mamma had turned and washed and colored and made over, and strained every nerve to keep her darling looking nice. No, in that dress Katy would look more like a sweet little Red-Riding-Hood, going to take something for her grandmother's supper, and Peter knew it.

So he called his wife into his counsels, and told her his plans for Katy, and that he wanted her fixed up right.

Nancy was more than willing to do this, for Katy's clothes would sell for quite a sum, and she meant that for her own private purse. Besides she should enjoy dressing the little minx in rags, she thought. So she took an old dress-skirt of her own that was ragged around the bottom, and tearing off a skirt long enough for Katy, made it up in a very few minutes, leaving the rags at the bottom as they were. Then she cut out a rude sort of waist, and basted, rather than sowed it together, and Katy's dress was done. Then she told Katy to take off her clothes, and she did not dare disobey.

Then Nancy dressed her in the rags, put an old hood of her own on the brown head, and wrapped her in a ragged shawl.

"I look just like a beggar," thought Katy.

Peter came in just then, and said:

"So you are ready, are you? Come on then."

Katy wonderingly followed Peter, who, with basket on his arm, went the whole length of the alley till he came to a short street that turned into a wide fine one with handsome houses each side of it. Here he stopped and said: "Now, little gal, you must take this basket and go into every house on this street. Tell them yer mother is sick, and you've got three little sisters, and they haven't got nothing in the house to eat, and ask 'em to give you some cold pieces; go to the basement door and pull the bell, and mind you stay till somebody comes; ring and knock till you bring somebody. Then you must hold out your hand to every one you meet on the street and ask for pennies, and tell them the same story about yer sick mother and yer three little sisters."

Katy was a timid little thing, but the idea of being a beggar indeed, and of being told that she must tell so many naughty lies, put courage in her, so she looked up in Peter's face and said:

"Oh, no, Mr. Peter, I can't do that. I never begged in my life, and my mamma told me never to tell a lie. She said God would hear me right off if I told a lie, and she said he didn't love liars, and he couldn't take them to heaven, and that's where she said she was going, and I want to go there so much. Please don't make me do it."

But the old man's face was dark with rage. He took hold of her arm and gave her a hard shaking, and told her she should do it. "What do you s'pose I took you for but to work?" he said.

"Oh, I will work," said Katy, with tears rolling down her cheeks. "I will work, Mr. Peter, pick up chips, or I'll run errands and do anything you tell me, but I can't be a beggar and tell lies."

"Now, stop that stuff. I say you 'shall,' and you just take this basket and do as I tell you, and when you have gone all through this street bring it home. Are you going to do as I tell you?"

Peter was holding out the basket, but Katy did not take it.

"No," said Katy, "I won't be a beggar and a liar, I 'won't.'"

"We'll see about that," said Peter. "I guess you would rather do it than take a good sound whipping. Come, go along, and you will get some real nice things to eat, and maybe they'll give you lots of money, then you shall have a penny for your own. Come, go 'long, that's a good gal," said Peter, thinking a little coaxing was what was needed.

"No! I can't. I never will," sobbed Katy.

"Come along home then," said Peter, seeing they were attracting the attention of the passers-by.

Peter was very angry, and he shuffled off home in less time than he came, dragging Katy with a pale sad face after him. As soon as they get there, he whipped her most cruelly, then he gave her the basket and told her to go and do as he bid her, but she could not stand up when she tried, and fell over on the floor in a fainting fit.

"There, now," said Peter's wife, "better kill her and be done with it."

And Peter almost thought he had killed her, for he splashed cold water in her face till she came to, then he lifted her up and put her on her bed, when he left her in peace for the rest of that day. Poor little lamb! Lying there in her loneliness and sorrow, with no one to comfort her, unless maybe the angels came and comforted her, for very soon the sobs ceased, and she fell into a sweet sleep which lasted till the next morning.

When Katy awoke the next morning, nobody else was stirring, so she lay still and thought it all over—all the hard things she went through yesterday, it seemed a good many days in one. Then she went back to the other days, when mamma and she lived in the pleasant attic room, before they got so very poor.

How brightly the sun peeped in there mornings, and how nice their little room looked when she opened her eyes and saw mamma setting the table for breakfast, and the fire burning brightly and the tea-kettle singing, and the coffee boiling, and the potatoes roasting; how good they did smell. Then pretty soon mamma's voice would say—

"Where is my little dautie? Don't she want to be dressed and eat breakfast with mamma?"

Oh, why didn't that nice time stay? Was that warm happy Katy and this poor hungry cold Katy the same? But what should she do about the begging? For she knew old Peter would send her as soon as he got up. The poor little body shrank from the thought, of any more dreadful blows, but then to put on those horrid clothes and be a beggar, such as she had often watched from the window.

"Oh dear! Oh dear!" she sobbed. "I suppose I've got to be a beggar, but I won't tell lies, anyhow.

"I wonder where my own clothes are, and if I have got to wear the dirty rags all the time. She's a naughty, bad woman to take away my clothes that my own mamma made me."

Just then Nancy told her to get up.

"I want my clothes," said Katy, but the only answer she received was a blow, and a command to put on the clothes she gave her, as that was all she would get.

Peter took the command now and told Katy to dress herself pretty fast and take her basket and start,—that she would get no breakfast until she begged it, and if she didn't find something to bring home for their dinners, she would get such a "thrashing" as she never heard of.

So out into the cold frosty air she went, without breakfast, with her bare feet and her thin clothes, letting in snow and wet. She did not tell the story that Peter told her to, though, she simply asked for pieces, and at many a place she fared well. Some seemed touched by the modest, half-ashamed way in which she asked. Then, for all she was dressed in rags, her little pale face, so sweet and sad, was different from the other beggars that came about.

The basket was getting nearly full, but Katy had the hardest part to do yet; she had not asked anybody for pennies. That was so hard to do, but she was afraid to go back without any; so with her head down, and her eyes on the ground, she held out her little hand to the first person she met.

She was such a wee little girl that the people in their hurry hardly saw her, and came near throwing her over, but many noticed the bright eyes far back in the hood and threw their pennies to her. One old gentleman gave her five cents, and said: "Bless me, what a baby that is to send out this cold day!"

She thought now she might venture to go back, for she was so tired and cold.

Peter and his wife were well satisfied with her first day's work.

"Didn't I tell you," said Peter, "that she could earn her own and ours, too?"

That day was a sample of a great many other long days and months that followed. Katy was started off every morning; be it cold, or wet, or stormy, no weather was allowed to keep her in. Sometimes she felt too weak and tired to walk any farther, and she would creep away in some sheltered place and lie down. The cold and thin clothes made her look very unlike the round-faced little girl she used to be. But she would drag herself about, all through the weary day, sometimes treated coldly, and told that she was a "nuisance," to "Get out! And not come there any more."

Often the people said, "nothing to-day." Then Katy had to go father into the other streets, and look till she found something to take home, for once or twice she had brought home an empty basket, and Peter had nearly killed her, he was so angry with her.

He and his wife both drank harder than before, and Katy was glad when she came home tired and shivering with cold to crawl into her poor little bed and wrap the old quilt about her, as often that was all the warmth she could get, for the miserable couple would both be in a drunken sleep, and the fire all out. If they were awake, they were usually quarreling, so she was glad to get away from them as quickly as she could.

For a while she used to say her prayer, but after a time she thought, "What's the use? I guess God has forgot all about me; I don't suppose he cares much for folks that live down in cellars anyhow."

So the poor little girl ran away from the only One that could help or comfort her.

Sometimes she had trouble with the bad boys in the alley. They would snatch her basket and steal everything she had in it. Then she must go back and get something more, or go home and be pounded and kicked as if she were a little animal.

But Peter, if he were sober enough, kept a sharp lookout after such times, although he always told Katy he didn't "believe a word of it."