A confused recollection of having heard the words and tune sung by my mother when I was at the rocking age myself brought the tears to my eyes as I flew to the window and parted the curtains.  If you heard a little boy-angel singing at your casement wouldn’t you expect a cherubim face upturned with heaven-lights all over it?  Billy’s face was upturned as he heard me draw the shade, but it was streaked like a wild Indian’s with decorations of brown mud and he held a long slimy fish-worm on the end of a stick while he wiped his other grimy hand down the front of his linen blouse.

[Illustration:  I lifted him into my arms]

“Say, Molly, look at the snake I brunged you!” he exclaimed as he came close under the sill, which is not high from the ground.  “If you put your face down to the mud and sing something to ’em they’ll come outen they holes.  A doodle-bug comed, too, but I couldn’t ketch ’em both.  Lift me up and I can put him in the water-glass on your table.”  He held up one muddy paddie to me and promptly I lifted him up into my arms.  From the embrace in which he and the worm and I indulged my lace and dimity came out much the worse.

“That was a lovely song you sang about ‘Molly, darling’, Billy,” I said.  “Where did you hear it?”

“That’s a good bug-song, Molly, and I bet I can git a lizard with it, too, if I sing it right low.”  He began to squirm out of my arms toward the table and the glass.

“Who taught it to you, sugar-sweet?” I persisted as I poured water in on the squirming worm under his direction.

“Nobody taught it to me.  Doc sings it to me when Tilly, nurse, nor you ain’t there to put me to bed.  He don’t know no good songs like Roll, Jordan, Roll, or Hot Times or Twinkle.  I go to sleep quick ’cause he makes me feel tired with his slow tune what’s only good for bugs.  Git a hair-pin for me to poke him with, Molly, quick!”

I found the hair-pin and I don’t know why my hand trembled as I handed it to Billy.  As soon as he got it he climbed out the window, glass, bug and all, and I saw him and the red setter go down the garden walk together in pursuit of the desired lizard, I suppose.  I closed the blinds and drew the curtains again and flung myself on my pillow.  Something warm and sweet seemed to be sweeping over me in great waves and I felt young and close up to some sort of big world-good.  It was delicious and I don’t know how long I would have stayed there just feeling it if Judy hadn’t brought in my letter.

He had written from London, and it was many pages of wonderful things all flavored with me.  He told me about Miss Chester and what good friends they were, and how much he hoped she would be in Hillsboro when he got here.  He said that a great many of her dainty ways reminded him of his “own slip of a girl”, especially the turn of her head like a “flower on its stem.”  At that I got right out of bed like a jack jumping out of a box and looked at myself in the mirror.