Nelly

Chapter I

"WHAT'S the use?" said Nelly, with a sort of hopeless bitterness in her tone. "There's no use in my ever trying to be anybody!"

Nelly Ryan was leaning against the rickety gate of her grandmother's more rickety cottage, watching a procession of girls about her own age, who were passing on the other side of the street on their way to church. There were about thirty of them, all very nicely dressed, walking two-and-two, and talking quietly to each other. They were the pupils of an old-established boarding-school in the place where Nelly lived; and, as Nelly looked at their dainty, fresh spring dresses and bonnets, their neat boots and gloves, and white collars, and then at her own ragged, faded delaine, her toes peeping out of a pair of old shoes much too large for her, and the tangled, rusty elf-locks of her hair, she felt the contrast very deeply and bitterly. She was a pretty little girl, about thirteen years old, with curly black hair, gray eyes, and a slender but strong and lithe figure. Not one of all the girls she envied could match her in good looks; but her slender hands were grimed and encrusted with dirt, and her face not much better off; her hair looked as if it had hardly known a comb, and her frock was covered with grease and dirt and torn into various stirrups and three-cornered rents. She might have been called a hopeless-looking child enough; and yet there was something in her face that promised better things. She stood looking after the school-girls till they turned a corner, and then, leaning her head against the gate, she cried bitterly but quietly, all the while saying to herself—