JENNY WREN
[Illustration: JENNY WREN]
JENNY WREN
Her real name was Fanny Cleaver, but she had long ago dropped it, and
chosen to bestow upon herself the fanciful appellation of Miss Jenny
Wren, by which title she was known to the entire circle of her friends
and business acquaintances.
Miss Wren's home was in a certain little street called Church Street,
running out from a certain square called Smith Square, at Millbank, and
there the little lady plied her trade, early and late, having for
companions her father and a lodger, Lizzie Hexam. Her father had once
been a good workman at his own trade, but unfortunately for poor little
Jenny Wren, was so weak in character and so confirmed in bad habits that
she could place no trust in him, and had come to consider herself the
head of the family, and to speak of him as "my child," or "my bad boy,"
ordering him about as if he were in truth, a child.
When Lizzie Hexam's brother and a friend, Bradley Headstone, paid their
first visit to the house on Church Street, they knocked at the door,
which promptly opened and disclosed a child--a dwarf, a girl--sitting on
a little, low, old-fashioned arm-chair, which had a kind of little
working-bench before it.
"I can't get up," said the child, "because my back's bad and my legs are
queer. But I'm the person of the house."
"Who else is at home?" asked Charley Hexam, staring?
"Nobody's at home at present," returned the child, with a glib
assertion of her dignity, "except the person of the house.
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