PETERSON’S MAGAZINE.
THE
ORPHAN'S
NEW - YEAR'S
EVE.
BY FRANK LEE BENEDICT.
SUCH a dreary, dismal New-Year's Eve , endurable only as it made the comfort of home contrast more strongly with the darkness and cold without.
Snow and ice on the pavements- clouds and darkness overhead-a chill wind that struck to the very heart, barbed with flakes of snow which stung like tiny daggers, and gave fierce menace of the sterner winter beyond.
Slowly out of the darkness came the child into the flickering glare of the street lamp. She had just passed a man muffled in thick, warm garments, who had not even heard her broken petition for help, or noticed her desolate appearance a man who all his life had consulted his own ease and selfishness more than the comfort of any human being, and who now, hurrying along under, the influence of numberless bitter feelings, was not likely to think of any other creature's distress.
She came on toward the corner house where the lights streamed through the shutterless windows, and lay broad and full on the deeply tracked snow.
She climbed up the railings and stared in at the window, so benumbed now with the cold that she did not suffer with the acuteness of the previous hour, stared in with a vague idea of comfort connected with the bright lights and the cheerful fire as the glow fell over her hands.
Such a piteous sight, as she stood there, with the angels up in heaven and New-Year's Eve on earth!
The wind was blowing her thin dress and shawl wildly about in the darkness of a back street she had lost the old shoes which partially protected her feet, and now they clung naked upon the iron rails-her head was uncovered, and her long hair streamed over her face as if trying to keep it warm.
The worn, haggard little face, with childhood and happiness frozen out of it; the wild, despairing eyes, with a look so strange for a child's eyes to wear, gazing in at the fire and the lighted room, and yet seeming a whole world away from its luxury and warmth.
She had set her old basket down upon the stones. It was almost empty, and she had not dared to go back to the place she called home; so, after the night came, had wandered about the streets, growing colder and colder, weeping sometimes in a chilled, nerveless way ; at others stamping upon the ground with a passionate bitterness taught by the precocious hardening of her life ; settling at last into a passive misery which was in her face still, as she clung against the frosty iron railings and peered into the lighted room.
The family were gathered in that pleasant apartment. Old Mr. Leyton looking so content with the cares and troubles of a long life left behind, and that peace in his face which is the glory of old age ; young Mr. Walter, and his wife, and the little ones, and quite a crowd of youthful cousins, all spending a quiet, happy evening with grandfather and cousin Mildred.
She alone was wanting-an unseasonable visitor had called cousin Mildred away more than an hour before; and though he had been heard to leave the house, Mildred had not returned to the library.
The room was quite desolate without her. It always was, and, having decided that her absence was not to be borne any longer, a chorus of voices rang through the hall,
"Mildred ! Cousin Mildred ! Are you never coming back?"
The voices reached the little morning room where Mildred had received her visitor, and where she still sat just as he had left her, leaning over the fire, looking absently into the blaze, and thinking of all that lay between her and the innocence of her girlhood -looking back as we do at thirty, when any chance incident or person
