When the circus came to town and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way. It was the time of the greatest parsimony in their fathers house; everyone knows the first huhousand is the most difficult and the dollar bills were breeding slowly, slowly, even if he practised a little touch of usury on the side to prick his cash in the dire of greater productivity. In aen years time, the War betweeates would provide rich pigs for the coffin-makers, but, back then, ba the Fifties, well -- if he had been a praying man, he would have gone down on his knees for a little outbreak of summer cholera or a touch, just a touch, of typhoid. To his chagrin, there had been nobody to bill when he had buried his wife.
For, at that time, the girls were just freshly orphaned. Emma was thirteen, Lizzie four -- stern and square, a squat regle of a child. Emma parted Lizzies hair in the middle, stretched it back over each side of her bulging forehead and braided it tight. Emma dressed her, undressed her, scrubbed her night and m with a damp flannel, and humped the great lump of little girl around in her arms whenever Lizzie would let her, although Lizzie was not a demonstrative child and did not show affe easily, except to the head of the house, and then only when she wanted something. She knew where the power was and, intuitively feminine in spite of her gruff appearance, she knew how to court it.
That cottage on Ferry -- very well, it was a slum; but the uaker lived on uned among the stiff furnishings of his defunct marriage. His bits and pieces would be admired today if they turned up freshly beeswaxed in an antique store, but in those days they were plain old-fashioned, and time would only make them more so in that dreary interior, the tiny house he never mended, eroding clapboard and diseased paint, mildew on the dark aper with a brown pattern like brains, the ominous crimson border round the top of the walls, the sisters sleeping in one room ihrifty bed.
On Ferry, in the worst part of town, among the dark-skinned Puese fresh off the boat with their earrings, flashih and inprehensible speech, e over the o to work the mills whose newly erected eys closed in every perspective; every year more eys, more smoke, more newers, and the peremptory shriek of the whistle that summoo labour as bells had once summoo prayer.
The hovel on Ferry stood, or, rather, lea a bibulous angle on a narrow street cut across at an oblique angle by another narrow street, all the old wooden homes like an upset cookie jar of broken gingerbread houses lurg this way and that way, and the shutters hanging off their hinges and windows stuffed with old neers, and the snagged picket fend raised voices in unknown tongues and howling of dogs who, since puppyhood, had known of the world only the circumference of their . Outside the parlour window were nothing but rows of terfeit houses that sometimes used to scream.
Such was the anxious architecture of the two girls early childhood.
A hand came in the night and stuck a poster, showing the head of a tiger, on to a picket fence. As soon as Lizzie saw the poster, she wao go to the circus, but Emma had no money, not a t. The thirteen-year-old was keeping house at that time, the last skivvy just quit with bad words on both sides. Every m, Father would pute the days expenses, hand Emma just so muo more. He was angry when he saw the poster on the fence; he thought the circus shoul