Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Captain Molly: A Love Story
Baby bassett was a marvel. Even in that child-ridden community, Flagler Tenement, to which some wag had given the sounding title of paradise flats, where the minor key in child ish sobs, and the major key in childish laughter, prevailed from morning till night, that Bassett baby was a wonder and delight.
Baby Bassett first saw the light in a cellar, which, however, made no difference to him. It really was a respectable cellar, as cellars go. The floor was hard, and two windows let in daylight from the sidewalk. At night it was brilliantly illuminated with a tallow dip.
Inside it might have been gloomy; but Reine Bassett, the young and pretty mother of Baby Bassett, cared little for that.
In hot weather, before that adorable baby came, the Bassetts sat upon the steps, and greeted their neighbors, who might be expressed as legion.
After that important event happened, the neigh bors saluted the baby's mother with something like reverence.
The baby was like a pure white lily, lying in his improvised bed made in a big clothes-basket. The father of this child, Sebastian Bassett, was in the first stages Of alcoholic decrepitude, and yet he was scarcely thirty years Old. The man had a history, but nobody knew What it was. He had no business to be either a husband or a father; yet there he was, an accepted fact, and with a superb presence that declared for good ancestry. His life was largely migratory. The only reason that he lived in the cellar of Paradise Flats was because he could get no lower. And yet the soul of an artist dwelt in that marred body. At one time he had painted marvellously well. His pic tures had sold for good prices, but every cent that came to him was Spent for drink. Now, with an unsteady hand, and a certain scorn in his brilliant eyes, he drew wonderful outlines, When he was sober, on the sidewalks, and rarely failed to earn a few pennies, which he Spent in the ale-house.
His wife, poor little thing, was the bread-win ner. She would willingly have worked her hands Off to provide something for her vagabond to eat.
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