At first Hannah did not love him.  Ah, you know, such unwelcome children are seldom loved, even by their parents.  But this child was so patient and affectionate, that it must have been an unnatural heart that would not have been won by his artless efforts to please.  He bore hunger and cold and weariness with baby heroism.  And if you doubt whether there is any such a thing in the world as “baby heroism”, just visit the nursery hospitals of New York, and look at the cheerfulness of infant sufferers from disease.

Ishmael was content to sit upon the floor all day long, with his big eyes watching Hannah knit, sew, spin, or weave, as the case might be.  And if she happened to drop her thimble, scissors, spool of cotton, or ball of yarn, Ishmael would crawl after it as fast as his feeble little limbs would take him, and bring it back and hold it up to her with a smile of pleasure, or, if the feat had been a fine one, a little laugh of triumph.  Thus, even before he could walk, he tried to make himself useful.  It was his occupation to love Hannah, and watch her, and crawl after anything she dropped and restore it to her.  Was this such a small service?  No; for it saved the poor woman the trouble of getting up and deranging her work to chase rolling balls of yarn around the room.  Or was it a small pleasure to the lonely old maid to see the child smile lovingly up in her face as he tendered her these baby services?  I think not.  Hannah grew to love little Ishmael.  Who, indeed, could have received all his innocent overtures of affection and not loved him a little in return?  Not honest Hannah Worth.  It was thus, you see, by his own artless efforts that he won his grim aunt’s heart.  This was our boy’s first success.  And the truth may as well be told of him now, that in the whole course of his eventful life he gained no earthly good which he did not earn by his own merits.  But I must hurry over this part of my story.

When Ishmael was about four years old he began to take pleasure in the quaint pictures of the old family Bible, that I have mentioned as the only book and sole literary possession of Hannah Worth.  A rare old copy it was, bearing the date of London, 1720, and containing the strangest of all old old-fashioned engravings.  But to the keenly appreciating mind of the child these pictures were a gallery of art.  And on Sunday afternoons, when Hannah had leisure to exhibit them, Ishmael never wearied of standing by her side, and gazing at the illustrations of “Cain and Abel,” “Joseph Sold by his Brethren,” “Moses in the Bulrushes,” “Samuel Called by the Lord,” “John the Baptist and the Infant Jesus,” “Christ and the Doctors in the Temple,” and so forth.

“Read me about it,” he would say of each picture.

And Hannah would have to read these beautiful Bible stories.  One day, when he was about five years old, he astonished his aunt by saying: 

“And now I want to read about them for myself!”