That Girl of Johnson's — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

6 THAT GIRL OF JOHNSON’S. rich, rumor said, and they did not blame him for having nothing to do with his shiftless brother. He lived in a fine house in New York; was enterprising and shrewd ; how could any one blame him for dropping this ne’er-do- well brother ? His brother thought differently. Lemuel was rich; fate — had been good to him; it was but right that he should help him; it was an unheard of thing that he had never offered to help him, especially when this added burden was laid upon his already too heavily laden shoulders. Of what good to him was a girl? Girls were of little use. Had she been a boy—but she was not a boy, and she was motherless from the time she was three weeks old. With a pathetic appreciation of the fitness of things her mother named her Dolores. And from the time she was taken from the dying mother’s arms into the kindly if rather awkward arms of Betsy Glenn, her large brown eyes, shaded by long curling lashes, looked out upon the world with a strange gravity and a knowledge of what it meant to be brought into the world unwelcome and un loved. | | She seldom cried. She never cooed as other and happier babies do. She would lie for hours in her rude cradle and stare at nothing, the neighbors said, with those wonderful eyes of hers until the heart of her rough but kindly friend, Betsy Glenn, throbbed with an undefined pity for the strange child. And as she grew older silence grew upon her. All the happiness, all the brightness of life that come to most girls, seemed shut out from her by that hard fact of not being wanted. But she apparently cared little about it; her thoughts seemed far away and dreamy. She said little and the neighbors seldom ran in to gossip with her as they did with each other, for there was no use; she took no interest in them or their gossip; no one could talk easily with her eyes upon them.. So, when she grew - old enough and there was no further need of Betsy Glenn’s presence and care, she was able to attend to the household m Xi y= comicbooks