Laura Brayton — page 85: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

76 LAURA BRAYTON. kind inquiry leading to another, informs him that he rents for his mother and himself only that room and a bedroom for her use; also that in the same _tenement-house there dwells one who is “all the world” to Sammy, and a great deal to ‘his mother, for in her the good old lady yet expects to seea daughter when Sammy gets able to support a wife. She works in a book-bindery down-town, for a good- hearted old Englishman on F—— street, and will be home early that day for she had arranged to bring a part of her work home soas to sit by his side while he was in pain and unable to get up. “Annie is just the nicest little gal that ever stepped,” said Sammy, proudly. “I only wish she’d come in while you’re here. You’d say you’d never seen her beat—not even at the Holiday.” At this instant there was a rustle of calico, and in, before she saw that there were strangers there, hurried a golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty, plump as a partridge, and breathless with haste. “Oh, Sammy!” she cried; then, with her face mantled in blushes, she would have fled out of the room, had not Sammy called out: “Don’t go, these are my friends, they’re not the stuck-up kind o’ chaps that is too proud to speak to workies like us. This’ is Mr. Putnam, that saved the woman and little baby when I couldn’t. Shake hands with him, Annie, just for me now.” Thus urged, in a modest flutter, poor Annie ex- tended her small labor-bronzed hand, and timidly expressed her thanks at being introduced to Sam- my’s friend. And then she took ost of her pocket an orange, and two big red apples, one of the latter being for Sammy’s mother, and laid them down on the little “comicbooks (elo)