At three o’clock the little blind girls all went out to play in one yard, and the little blind boys in the other.

“Goin’ out to take their air,” said Katie.  Then she and Dotty followed the girls in respectful silence.

Almost every one had a particular friend; and it was wonderful to see how certain any two friends were to find one another by the sense of feeling, and walk off together, arm in arm.  It was strange, too, that they could move so fast without hitting things and falling down.

“When I am blindfolded,” thought Dotty, “it makes me dizzy, and I don’t know where I am.  When I think anything isn’t there, the next I know I come against it, and make my nose bleed.”

She was not aware that while the most of these children were blind, there were others who had a little glimmering of eyesight.  The world was night to some of them; to others, twilight.

They did not know Dotty and Katie were following them, and they chatted away as if they were quite by themselves.

“Emily, have you seen my Lilly Viola?” said one little girl to another.  “Miss Percival has dressed her all over new with a red dressing-gown and a black hat.”

The speaker was a lovely little girl with curly hair; but her eyes were closed, and Dotty wondered what made her talk of “seeing” a doll.

Emily took “Lilly Viola,” and travelled all over her hat and dress and kid boots with her fingers.

“Yes, Octavia,” said she, “she is very pretty ­ever so much prettier than my Victoria Josephine.”

Then both the little girls talked sweet nothings to their rag babies, just like any other little girls.

“Is the dollies blind-eyed, too?” asked Katie, making a dash forward, and peeping into the cloth face of a baby.

The little mamma, whose name was Octavia, smiled, and taking Katie by the shoulders, began to touch her all over with her fingers.

“Dear little thing!” said she; “what soft hair!”

“Yes,” replied Katie; “velly soft.  Don’t you wish, though, you could see my new dress?  It’s got little blue yoses all over it.”

“I know your dress is pretty,” said Octavia, gently, “and I know you are pretty, too, your voice is so sweet.”

“Well, I eat canny,” said Katie, “and that makes my voice sweet.  I’se got ‘most a hunnerd bushels o’ canny to my house.”

“Have you truly?” asked the children, gathering about Flyaway, and kissing her.

“Yes, and I’se got a sweet place in my neck, too; but my papa’s kissed it all out o’ me.”

“Isn’t she a darling?” said Octavia, with delight.

“Yes,” answered Dotty, very glad to say a word to such remarkable children as these; “yes, she is a darling; and she has on a white dress with blue spots, and a hat trimmed with blue; and her hair is straw color.  They call her Flyaway, because she can’t keep still a minute.”

“Yes, I does; I keeps still two, free, five, all the minutes,” cried Katie; and to prove it, she flew across the yard, and began to pry into one of the play-houses.

“She doesn’t mean to be naughty; you must scuse her,” spoke up Dotty, very loud; for she still held unconsciously to the idea that blind people must have dull ears.  “She is a nice baby; but I s’pose you don’t know there are some play-houses in this yard, and she’ll get into mischief if I don’t watch her.”

“Why, all these play-houses are ours,” said little curly-haired Emily; “whose did you think they were?”

“Yours?” asked Dotty, in surprise; “can you play?”

Emily laughed merrily.

“Why not?  Did you think we were sick?”

Dotty did not answer.

“I am Mrs. Holiday,” added Emily; “that is, I generally am; but sometimes I’m Jane.  Didn’t you ever read Rollo on the Atlantic?”

Dotty, who could only stammer over the First Reader at her mother’s knee, was obliged to confess that she had never made Rollo’s acquaintance.

“We have books read to us,” said Emily.  “In the work-hour we go into the sitting-room, and there we sit with the bead-boxes in our laps, making baskets, and then our teacher reads to us out of a book, or tells us a story.”

“That is very nice,” said Dotty; “people don’t read to me much.”

“No, of course not, because you can see.  People are kinder to blind children ­didn’t you know it?  I’m glad I had my eyes put out, for if they hadn’t been put out I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Where should you have gone, then?”

“I shouldn’t have gone anywhere; I should just have staid at home.”

“Don’t you like to stay at home?”

Emily shrugged her shoulders.

“My paw killed a man.”

“I don’t know what a paw is,” said Dotty.

“O, Flyaway Clifford, you’ve broken a teapot!”

“No matter,” said Emily, kindly; “’twas made out of a gone-to-seed poppy.  Don’t you know what a paw is?  Why, it’s a paw”

In spite of this clear explanation, Dotty did not understand any better than before.

“It was the man that married my maw, only maw died, and then there was another one, and she scolded and shook me.”

“O, I s’pose you mean a father ’n mother; now I know.”

“I want to tell you,” pursued Emily, who loved to talk to strangers.  “She didn’t care if I was blind; she used to shake me just the same.  And my paw had fits.”

The other children, who had often heard this story, did not listen to it with great interest, but went on with their various plays, leaving Emily and Dotty standing together before Emily’s baby-house.

“Yes, my paw had fits.  I knew when they were coming, for I could smell them in the bottle.”

“Fits in a bottle!”

“It was something he drank out of a bottle that made him have the fits.  You are so little that you couldn’t understand.  And then he was cross.  And once he killed a man; but he didn’t go to.”

“Then he was guilty,” said Dotty, in a solemn tone.  “Did they take him to the court-house and hang him?”

“No, of course they wouldn’t hang him.  They said it was the third degree, and they sent him to the State’s Prison.”

“O, is your father in the State’s Prison?”

Dotty thought if her father were in such, a dreadful place, and she herself were blind, she should not wish to live; but here was Emily looking just as happy as anybody else.  Indeed, the little girl was rather proud of being the daughter of such a wicked man.  She had been pitied so much for her misfortunes that she had come to regard herself as quite a remarkable person.  She could not see the horror in Dotty’s face, but she could detect it in her voice; so she went on, well satisfied.

“There isn’t any other little girl in this school that has had so much trouble as I have.  A lady told me it was because God wanted to make a good woman of me, and that was why it was.”

“Does it make people good to have trouble?” asked Dotty, trying to remember what dreadful trials had happened to herself.  “Our house was burnt all up, and I felt dreadfully.  I lost a tea-set, too, with gold rims.  I didn’t know I was any better for that.”

“O, you see, it isn’t very awful to have a house burnt up,” said Emily; “not half so awful as it is to have your eyes put out.”

“But then, Emily, I’ve been sick, and had the sore throat, and almost drowned ­and ­and ­the whooping-cough when I was a baby.”

“What is your name?” asked Emily; “and how old are you?”

“My name is Alice Parlin, and I am six years old.”

“Why, I am nine; and see ­your head! only comes under my chin.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” replied Dotty, with some spirit.  “I wouldn’t be as tall as you are for anything, and me only six ­going on seven.”

“I suppose your paw is rich, and good to you, and you have everything you want ­don’t you, Alice?”

“No, my father isn’t rich at all, Emily, and I don’t have many things ­no, indeed,” replied Miss Dimple, with a desire to plume herself on her poverty and privations.  “My aunt ’Ria has two girls, but we don’t, only our Norah; and mother never lets me put any nightly-blue sirreup on my hangerjif ’cept Sundays.  I think we’re pretty poor.”

Dotty meant all she said.  She had now become a traveller; had seen a great many elegant things; and when she thought of her home in Portland, it seemed to her plainer and less attractive than it had ever seemed before.

“I don’t know what you would think,” said Emily, counting over her trials on her fingers as if they had been so many diamond rings, “if you didn’t have anything to eat but brown bread and molasses.  I guess you’d think that was pretty poor!  And got the molasses all over your face, because you couldn’t see to put it in your mouth.  And had that woman shake you every time you spoke.  And your paw in State’s Prison because he killed a man.  O, no,” repeated she, with triumph, “there isn’t any other little girl in this school that’s had so much trouble as I have.”

“No, I s’pose not,” responded Dotty, giving up the attempt to compare trials with such a wretched being; “but then I may be blind, some time, too.  P’rhaps a chicken will pick my eyes out.  A cross hen flew right up and did so to a boy.”

Emily paid no attention to this foolish remark.

“My paw writes me letters,” said she.  “Here is one in my pocket; would you like to read it?”

Dotty took the letter, which was badly written and worse spelled.

“Can you read it?” asked Emily, after Dotty had turned it over for some moments in silence.

“No, I cannot,” replied Dotty, very much ashamed; “but I’m going to school by and by, and then I shall learn everything.”

“O, no matter if you can’t read it to me; my teacher has read it ever so many times.  At the end of it, it says, ’Your unhappy and unfortunate paw.’  That is what he always says at the end of all his letters; and he wants me to go to the prison to see him.”

“Why, you couldn’t see him.”

“No,” replied Emily, not understanding that Dotty referred to her blindness; “no, I couldn’t see him.  The superintendent Wouldn’t let me go; he says it’s no place for little girls.”

“I shouldn’t think it was,” said Dotty, looking around for Flyaway, who was riding in a lady’s chair made by two admiring little girls.

“There was one thing I didn’t tell,” said Emily, who felt obliged to pour her whole history into her new friend’s ears; “I was sick last spring, and had a fever.  If it had been scarlet fever I should have died; but it was imitation of scarlet fever, and I got well.”

“I’m glad you got well,” said Dotty, rather tired of Emily’s troubles; “but don’t you want to play with the other girls?  I do.”

“Yes; let us play Rollo on the Ocean,” cried Octavia, who was Emily’s bosom friend, and was seldom away from her long at a time, but had just now been devoting herself to Katie.  “Here is the ship.  All aboard!”