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MRS. HICKEY.

Between the ages of six and seven a change took place in my life, and this is how it happened: My brother had been absent for sometime undergoing a cure. This proved ineffectual and it accounts for my mother's embittered attitude towards me. I would feel her eyes fixed upon me with such a hostile expression that it was evident that she was devising some plan to punish me for being in good health while St. Amar was incurable.

Looking back upon this time it is hard to make allowance for the many miseries I had to endure. One day my mother's maleficence came to a climax. Dragging me into her room, she pulled off my velvet jacket; then, in order to make me as ugly as possible, chopped off my hair in all directions with a pair of scissors. 

I remember well this incident because it was followed closely by my rescue (so it seemed to me then) by no other than my mother's washerwoman. Mrs. Hickey was her name. She had agreed with my mother to take me to live with her. One evening I placed my hand in hers, and without ever looking back at my mother, lying regally on her couch, I left the hotel to pass into the night towards a new life in the midst of New York's tenement quarters.

Mrs. Hickey was a stout, good-natured Irishwoman. She lived at the top of a high tenement building on Third Avenue. I remember the long drive in tramoar, and then the seemingly endless climb up the dark staircase. Once in her rooms Mrs. Hickey asked me if I had had my dinner. On my answering no, she fetched from the kitchen a slice of bread-and-butter and a large cup of black coffee. I had never tasted black coffee before but it was now to take an important place in my future meals.