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In: Children & Young Adult Reading·Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #20862.
The opening · free to read
Jefferson Square was a short street in Gaminsville, occupying just one block. It took only two things on one side of it to fill up the space from corner to corner. One was the Convent of the Good Shepherd, built on a large lot surrounded by a high brick wall; the other, a common where all the people around dumped cinders, rags, tin cans--in fact, anything on earth they wished to throw away. On the other side were dwelling-houses, and these were filled with children--lots of them. There surely were never so many children on one square before!
There were the Earlys, the Rickersons, the Bakers, the Adamses, the Mortons, and the Longs--twenty-one in all.
There were really twenty-eight; but the parents of seven children, though they were not what you might call poor, were not well-born like the others, so nobody counted them any more than they included them in the games that the twenty-one played. This was sad for the seven little outcasts, but the others never thought about that.
The twenty-one had splendid times together. It was play, play, play for ever--dolls, pin fairs, circuses, and games. Every afternoon they gathered in the Mortons' front gate, because it was wider and had three stone steps leading down from it, where all the children could sit.
One evening, the latter part of August, the sun had dipped down behind the world, leaving red splashes over a green sky. On seeing it the children played fast and furiously, for they knew only too well that when the sky looked like that they might at any moment be called indoors, made to eat their suppers and go to bed.
The oldest child of the lot was Henry Clay Morton. He was one of those boys who try to have their way in everything, and generally succeed; so, on this particular evening when he got tired playing "Grammammy Gray" and proposed "Lost My Handkerchief," the others consented without any fuss. The next thing to decide was who should be "ole man." They stood in a long row, and Henry Clay, pointing, began at the top and gave each child a word like this:
"Eeny, meany, miny, mo; Cracky, feeny, finy fo; Ommer neutcha, popper teucha; Rick, bick, ban, do.
"Oner-ry, oer-ry, ickery Ann; Phyllis and Phollis and Nicholas John; Queevy quavy, English Navy, Stinklum, stanklum, BUCK."
"Buck" was "ole man," and on this occasion happened to be Addison Gravison Rickerson, a little pudgy boy who was called "Addy Gravvy" for short. He took a handkerchief, and the children, joining hands, formed a big circle. Then skipping behind them he sang:
"Lost my hankshuff yesterday, Found it to-day, Filled it full 'er water, En dashed it away."
He sang the words twice, and then he let the handkerchief fall behind little Nell Morton, but she was watching, so she grabbed it and chased Addy Gravvy, trying to catch him before he could get round the circle into her place. He ran so fast he would have beaten her had not Willie Baker stuck out his foot, tripping him up so that little Nell easily caught him.
Addy Gravvy protested: "That's no fair, I won't go in the middle." For whoever got caught had to go in the middle until the close of the game.
"She is so little," explained Willie, "that she never could have caught anybody."
"Then she oughtn't to play," said Addy Gravvy.
At this the children all began talking at once, for Nell was a favourite, and matters were looking serious, when suddenly a shadow crossed the bar of light made by the Mortons' open front door.
"Paddy!" "Paddy!" cried a dozen frightened ones, and the little group took to their heels.
In two minutes the street was as silent as midnight, the only person left being a little old man whose back was bent almost double. He turned and looked after the children and gave a long, deep sigh.
Of course you wish to know all about the crooked man whose very shadow caused the children to stop their play and scamper to their homes.
You remember I told you that one side of Jefferson Square was occupied by the Convent of the Good Shepherd and the common? Well, this convent was a source of much interest and not a little awe to the children. They were always curious to know what was going on behind those high brick walls.
Nothing in the shape of a man, except the priests, was ever allowed inside the convent. You can judge, then, of the flutter it caused when one day at noon, as the children from their windows opposite were watching the penitents playing in the garden in their blue dresses and white caps, they saw a little man go boldly in their midst and with a shovel begin turning up the soil.
To be sure he was old and ugly; his back was bent like a hoop, and his long nose almost touched his toes as he leaned over his shovel--but all the same he was a man.
"I wonder who on earth he can be!" said Fanny Morton, and the nurse who was peering over her head thoughtlessly replied:
"One of Satan's own imps."
They did not see the newcomer for a long time after, then one morning the word passed that he was there. This time the big iron gates at the side were open, and he was wheeling barrows of coal into the convent cellar.
The next meeting was on the common where he was raking over old rubbish and abstracting rags and bits of iron. The children were about to speak to him when something in his brown and wrinkled face recalled the nurse-girl's remark about "Satan's imps," so they were afraid and ran home.
I do not know who started it, but soon he came to be known as "Paddy on the Turnpike," and just what this meant would be hard to say. While we all know that Paddys are common enough in cities, still there wasn't a turnpike for this one to be on within five miles of Jefferson Square.
Although the children were afraid of the old man, they could not help teasing him whenever they got a chance. It seemed reckless and brave to shout out something and then take to their heels. They dared not come too near, for the same nurse-girl, seeing the sensation that her first remark had created, added another more astonishing, to the effect that Paddy had traded his soul to the devil, and was hunting the rubbish on the common over, for sufficient money to buy it back. Which was, of course, sheer nonsense, and if the children had been as good as all children should be, they never for a moment would have believed such a stupid untruth.
By degrees they grew bolder. They would creep behind when he was bending over his ash pile, nearer and nearer. Then they would shout something about the devil and his bartered soul, thinking they were brave indeed. Once they approached so near that they almost touched him, but he turned around suddenly and reached out his rake as if he were going to rake them all in. At this a panic seized them, and they ran like young deer.
Finally Henry Clay Morton made a rhyme about him, and the others took it up. They never saw the old fellow without shouting to a sing-song tune that they had made themselves:
"Paddy on the Turnpike Couldn't count eleven, Put him on a leather bed, Thought he was in Heaven."
Not seeming to hear the children, the old man used to work in silence, gathering the bottles and rags and things and putting them in his bag. Once a week he sold all he had found and brought the money home to his wife.
Now Paddy and his wife lived in a little cottage on the far side of the common. And Paddy's wife was always sick. The poor woman had had a terrible accident in which she had been so badly crushed and twisted that she was never free from pain a single moment.
Paddy would rise early in the morning, and, before he left to go to his work, he would put her in her chair by the window so that she could look out on the common, and here she sat knitting socks all day long.
She did not know many people, so she was much alone. None of the neighbours in Jefferson Square were aware that such a person as Mrs. Paddy existed, though they might have seen her, if they had taken the trouble, every time they looked out of a front window; for she lived in plain view of all the dwellings on the Square.
But though none of the "well-bred" people ever knew of Mrs. Paddy's existence, sometimes the mother of the little outcasts who were too common to be the associates of fine ladies would drop in "to straighten things up a bit."
"Well, Mrs. Myer," she would say, "the top of the mornin' to ye. It's to market I've just been and the butcher sent ye a posy," and she would put a gay flower or two in the blue glass vase that stood on the sick woman's window-sill.
Or maybe one of the little outcasts would bring a bowl of steaming soup. "Mother thought you might like something to warm you up inside," the child would say, and Mrs. Paddy, unknown and unknowing of the fine world, would kiss and thank her with a smile that she must have learned from the angels.
But no other soul ever visited Mrs. Paddy, and knitting at her window, she led a solitary life indeed.
And the whole heart of Mrs. Paddy was bound up in Paddy, strange as that may seem. But, you must know, Paddy was a very different sort of a person from what the children imagined him. No matter what she was suffering, Mrs. Paddy had always a bright look for him, while, with her, Paddy would grow so tender and his knotty features would smooth out so, the children never would have recognised him.
And Paddy's thousand attentions could only have been prompted by a loving heart. He even grudged every penny that he had to spend on himself; and indeed he had often gone hungry that his Peggy might have some little comfort.
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