When she first saw a
daisy on the green, she gazed longingly, and then asked plaintively,
"Please, might I touch that?" When she was told that she might pluck a
few daisies she was much delighted. After her first experiences in the
botanising line she formally asked permission to pluck many wild
flowers; but she always seemed to have a dread of transgressing
against some dim law which had been hitherto represented to her mind
by the man in blue who used to watch over her miserable alley. Before
she became accustomed to receiving food at regular intervals, she
fairly touched the hearts of her foster-parents by one queer request.
The housewife was washing some Brussels sprouts, when the little stray
said timidly, "Please, may I eat a bit of that stalk?" Of course the
stringy mass was uneatable; but it turned out that the forlorn child
had been very glad to worry at the stalks from the gutter as a dog
does at an unclean bone. Another little girl was taken from the den
which she knew as home, after her parents had been sent to prison for
treating her with unspeakable cruelty. The matron of the country home
found that the child's body was scarred from neck to ankle in a
fashion which no lapse of years could efface.
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