"
"You want to buy candy, I suppose?"
"No, sir, a bureau."
Even the tired-looking probation officer looked up and smiled.
"What does a little girl like you want with a bureau?" asked the judge.
"So's I won't have to keep me duds under the bed."
"That's a commendable ambition. But what about these other charges;
truancy from school, fighting with the boys, throwing mud, and so on?"
"I never th'ow mud, 'ceptin' when I'm th'owin' back," explained Nance.
"A nice distinction," said the judge. "Is this child's mother present?"
Mrs. Snawdor, like a current that has been restrained too long, surged
eagerly forward, and overflowed her conversational banks completely.
"Well, I ain't exactly her mother, but I'm just the same as her mother.
You ast anybody in Calvary Alley. Ast Mr. Burks here, ast Mrs. Smelts
what I been to her ever since she was a helpless infant baby. When Bud
Molloy lay dyin' he says to the brakeman, 'You tell my wife to be good
to Nance,'"
"So she's your stepchild?"
"Yes, sir, an' Bud Molloy was as clever a man as ever trod shoe-leather.
So was Mr. Yager. Nobody can't say I ever had no trouble with my two
first. They wasn't what you might call as smart a man as Snawdor, but
they wasn't no fool."
It was a peculiarity of Mrs. Snawdor's that she always spoke of her
previous husbands as one, notwithstanding the fact that the virtues
which she attributed to them could easily have been distributed among
half a dozen.
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