Tom Duffan's Daughter

Tom Duffan's cabinet-pictures are charming bits of painting; but you
would cease to wonder how he caught such delicate home touches if you
saw the room he painted in; for Tom has a habit of turning his wife's
parlor into a studio, and both parlor and pictures are the better for
the habit.

One bright morning in the winter of 1872 he had got his easel into a
comfortable light between the blazing fire and the window, and was
busily painting. His cheery little wife--pretty enough in spite of her
thirty-seven years--was reading the interesting items in the morning
papers to him, and between them he sung softly to himself the favorite
tenor song of his favorite opera. But the singing always stopped when
the reading began; and so politics and personals, murders and music,
dramas and divorces kept continually interrupting the musical despair of
"Ah! che la morte ognora."

But even a morning paper is not universally interesting, and in the very
middle of an elaborate criticism on tragedy and Edwin Booth, the parlor
door partially opened, and a lovelier picture than ever Tom Duffan
painted stood in the aperture--a piquant, brown-eyed girl, in a morning
gown of scarlet opera flannel, and a perfect cloud of wavy black hair
falling around her.

"Mamma, if anything on earth can interest you that is not in a
newspaper, I should like to know whether crimps or curls are most
becoming with my new seal-skin set."

"Ask papa."

"If I was a picture, of course papa would know; but seeing I am only a
poor live girl, it does not interest him."

"Because, Kitty, you never will dress artistically."

"Because, papa, I must dress fashionably. It is not my fault if artists
don't know the fashions. Can't I have mamma for about half an hour?"

"When she has finished this criticism of Edwin Booth. Come in, Kitty; it
will do you good to hear it."

"Thank you, no, papa; I am going to Booth's myself to-night, and I
prefer to do my own criticism." Then Kitty disappeared, Mrs. Duffan
skipped a good deal of criticism, and Tom got back to his "Ah! che la
morte ognora" much quicker than the column of printed matter warranted.

"Well, Kitty child, what do you want?"

"See here."

"Tickets for Booth's?"

"Parquette seats, middle aisle; I know them. Jack always does get just
about the same numbers."

"Jack? You don't mean to say that Jack Warner sent them?"

Kitty nodded and laughed in a way that implied half a dozen different
things.

"But I thought that you had positively refused him, Kitty?"

"Of course I