"Don't it appear to you it's a kind of a stump? I don't want to do it just for the satisfaction; though it _would_ be a satisfaction to plough everything up thorough, and then rake it over smooth; what do you think?"

"What have you thought, Luclarion? Something, of course."

"She wants a real smart girl--for two dollars a week. She can't get her, because she ain't. And I kind of felt as though I should like to put in. Seemed to me it was a--but there! I haven't any right to stump _you_."

"Wouldn't it be rather an aggravation? I don't suppose you would mean to stay altogether?"

"Not unless--but don't go putting it into my head, Mrs. Ripwinkley.

I shall feel as if I _was_. And I don't think it goes quite so far as that, yet. We ain't never stumped to more than one thing at a time. What she wants is to be straightened out. And when things once looked _my_ way, she might get a girl, you see. Anyhow, 'twould encourage Pinkie, and kind of set her going. Pinkie likes things nice; but it's such a Hoosac tunnel to undertake, that she just lets it all go, and gets off up-stairs, and sticks a ribbon in her hair.

That's all she _can_ do. I s'pose 'twould take a fortnight, maybe?"

"Take it, Luclarion," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, smiling. Luclarion understood the smile.

"I s'pose you think it's as good as took. Well, perhaps it is--spoke for. But it wasn't me, you know. Now what'll you do?"

"Go into the kitchen and make the pudding."

"But then?"

"We are not stumped for then, you know."

"There was a colored girl here yesterday, from up in Garden Street, asking if there was any help wanted. I think she came in partially, to look at the flowers; the 'sturtiums _are_ splendid, and I gave her some. She was awfully dressed up,--for colors, I mean; but she looked clean and pleasant, and spoke bright. Maybe she'd come, temporary. She seemed taken with things. I know where to find her, and I could go there when I got through with the gruel. Mrs. Scarup must have that right off."

And Luclarion hurried away.

It was not the first time Mrs. Ripwinkley had lent Luclarion; but Miss Grapp had not found a kitchen mission in Boston heretofore. It was something new to bring the fashion of simple, prompt, neighborly help down intact from the hills, and apply it here to the tangle of city living, that is made up of so many separate and unrecognized struggles.

When Hazel came home from school, she went all the way up the garden walk, and in at the kitchen door. "That was the way she took it all," she said; "first the flowers, and then Luclarion and what they had for dinner, and a drink of water; and then up-stairs, to mother."

To-day she encountered in the kitchen a curious and startling apparition of change.

A very dusky brown maiden, with a petticoat of flashing purple, and a jacket of crimson, and extremely puzzling hair tied up with knots of corn color, stood in possession over the stove, tending a frica.s.see, of which Hazel recognized at once the preparation and savor as her mother's; while beside her on a cricket, munching cold biscuit and b.u.t.ter with round, large bites of very white little teeth, sat a small girl of five of the same color, gleaming and twinkling as nothing human ever does gleam and twinkle but a little darkie child.

"Where is Luclarion?" asked Hazel, standing still in the middle of the floor, in her astonishment.

"I don't know. I'm Damaris, and this one's little Vash. Don't go for callin' me Dam, now; the boys did that in my last place, an' I left, don' yer see? I ain't goin' to be swore to, anyhow!"

And Damaris glittered at Hazel, with her shining teeth and her quick eyes, full of fun and good humor, and enjoyed her end of the joke extremely.

"Have you come to _stay_?" asked Hazel.

"'Course. I don' mostly come for to go."

"What does it mean, mother?" Hazel asked, hurrying up into her mother's room.

And then Mrs. Ripwinkley explained.

"But what _is_ she? Black or white? She's got straight braids and curls at the back of her head, like everybody's"--

"'Course," said a voice in the doorway. "An' wool on top,--place where wool ought to grow,--same's everybody, too."

Damaris had come up, according to orders, to report a certain point in the progress of the frica.s.see.

"They all pulls the wool over they eyes, now-days, an sticks the straight on behind. Where's the difference?"

Mrs. Ripwinkley made some haste to rise and move toward the doorway, to go down stairs, turning Damaris from her position, and checking further remark. Diana and Hazel stayed behind, and laughed.

"What fun!" they said.

It was the beginning of a funny fortnight; but it is not the fun I have paused to tell you of; something more came of it in the home-life of the Ripwinkleys; that which they were "waiting to see."

Damaris wanted a place where she could take her little sister; she was tired of leaving her "shyin' round," she said. And Vash, with her round, fuzzy head, her bright eyes, her little flashing teeth, and her polished mahogany skin,--darting up and down the house "on Aarons," or for mere play,--dressed in her gay little scarlet flannel shirt-waist, and black and orange striped petticoat,--was like some "splendid, queer little fire-bug," Hazel said, and made a surprise and a picture wherever she came. She was "cute," too, as Damaris had declared beforehand; she was a little wonder at noticing and remembering, and for all sorts of handiness that a child of five could possibly be put to.

Hazel dressed rag babies for her, and made her a soap-box baby-house in the corner of the kitchen, and taught her her letters; and began to think that she should hate to have her go when Luclarion came back.

Damaris proved clever and teachable in the kitchen; and had, above all, the rare and admirable disposition to keep things scrupulously as she had found them; so that Luclarion, in her afternoon trips home, was comforted greatly to find that while she was "clearing and ploughing" at Mrs. Scarup's, her own garden of neatness was not being turned into a howling wilderness; and she observed, as is often done so astutely, that "when you _do_ find a neat, capable, colored help, it's as good help as you can have." Which you may notice is just as true without the third adjective as with.

Luclarion herself was having a splendid time.

The first thing she did was to announce to Mrs. Scarup that she was out of her place for two weeks, and would like to come to her at her wages; which Mrs. Scarup received with some such awed and unbelieving astonishment as she might have done the coming of a legion of angels with Gabriel at their head. And when one strong, generous human will, with powers of brain and body under it sufficient to some good work, comes down upon it as Luclarion did upon hers, there _is_ what Gabriel and his angels stand for, and no less sent of G.o.d.

The second thing Luclarion did was to clean that "settin'-room fire-place," to restore the pleasant brown color of its freestone hearth and jambs, to polish its rusty bra.s.ses till they shone like golden images of G.o.ds, and to lay an ornamental fire of chips and clean little sticks across the irons. Then she took a wet broom and swept the carpet three times, and dusted everything with a damp duster; and then she advised Mrs. Scarup, whom the gruel had already cheered and strengthened, to be "helped down, and sit there in the easy-chair, for a change, and let her take her room in hand." And no doctor ever prescribed any change with better effect. There are a good many changes that might be made for people, without sending them beyond their own doors. But it isn't the doctors who always know _what_ change, or would dare to prescribe it if they did.

Mrs. Scarup was "helped down," it seemed,--really up, rather,--into a new world. Things had begun all over again. It was worth while to get well, and take courage. Those bra.s.ses shone in her face like morning suns.

"Well, I do declare to Man, Miss Grapp!" she exclaimed; and breath and expression failed together, and that was all she could say.

Up-stairs, Luclarion swept and rummaged. She found the sheet and towel drawers, and made everything white and clean. She laid fresh napkins over the table and bureau tops, and set the little things--boxes, books, what not,--daintily about on them. She put a clean spread on the bed, and gathered up things for the wash she meant to have, with a recklessness that Mrs. Scarup herself would never have dared to use, in view of any "help" she ever expected to do it.

And then, with Pinkie to lend feeble a.s.sistance, Luclarion turned to in the kitchen.

It was a "clear treat," she told Mrs. Ripwinkley afterward. "Things had got to that state of mussiness, that you just began at one end and worked through to the other, and every inch looked new made over after you as you went along."

She put the children out into the yard on the planks, and gave them tin pans and clothes-pins to keep house with, and gingerbread for their dinner. She and Pinkie had cups of tea, and Mrs. Scarup had her gruel, and went up to bed again; and that was another new experience, and a third stage in her treatment and recovery.

When it came to the cellar, Luclarion got the ch.o.r.e-man in; and when all was done, she looked round on the renovated home, and said within herself, "If Scarup, now, will only break his neck, or get something to do, and stay away with his pipes and his boots and his contraptions!"

And Scarup did. He found a chance in some freight-house, and wrote that he had made up his mind to stay out there all winter; and Mrs.

Scarup made little excursions about the house with her returning strength, and every journey was a pleasure-trip, and the only misery was that at the end of the fortnight Miss Grapp was going away, and then she should be "all back in the swamp again."

"No, you won't," said Luclarion; "Pinkie's waked up, and she's going to take pride, and pick up after the children. She can do that, now; but she couldn't shoulder everything. And you'll have somebody in the kitchen. See if you don't. I've 'most a mind to say I'll stay till you do."

Luclarion's faith was strong; she knew, she said, that "if she was doing at her end, Providence wasn't leaving off at his. Things would come round."

This was how they did come round.

It only wanted a little sorting about. The pieces of the puzzle were all there. Hazel Ripwinkley settled the first little bit in the right place. She asked her mother one night, if she didn't think they might begin their beehive with a fire-fly? Why couldn't they keep little Vash?

"And then," said Diana, in her quiet way, slipping one of the big three-cornered pieces of the puzzle in, "Damaris might go to Mrs.

Scarup for her two dollars a week. She is willing to work for that, if she can get Vash taken. And this would be all the same, and better."