Even when school began, she had to work still. Miss Roxy was determined to send a big box of double-knit mittens to John Jackson before winter set in; and as fast as they were finished they were dampened, pressed, and laid away in the old hair trunk in the garret where Nancy slept.
Poor little girl! she hated the sight of mittens, and this summer a wild wish came into her head, that grew and grew, as she sat alone at her knitting, until it quite filled head and heart too.
A child from the city, spending the summer near Bassett, came now and then to school as a sort of pastime, and brought with her a doll that really went to sleep when you laid it down: shut its bright blue eyes, and never opened them until it was taken up!
It seemed to lonely little Nancy that such a doll would be all anybody could want in the world. If only Nancy had such a dear lovely creature to sleep in her bed at night, and sit up in the door beside her while she knit, she knew she would be perfectly happy; but that could never be. However, after much dreaming, wishing, and planning, one day a bright and desperate idea came across her. That night she asked a great many questions of Miss Roxy, who at last gave her a sharp answer, and told her to hold her tongue; but the child had found out all she wanted to know and did not mind the crossness.
Next morning she got up very early, and stealing across the garret, took an old book from a dusty pile on a shelf, then with a pair of scissors she had brought up overnight she cut out a blank leaf, and pinned it, carefully folded, into the pocket of her dress.
She did not go out-of-doors at the school recess, but took the pen with which she had been writing her copy, and smoothing the paper out, wrote this queer little letter:
"DEER GENTILMAN,--I am a poor little gurl who nits mittins for Miss Roxy. I am bound out and I havent got no folks of my own, not so much as a verry smal baby. I wish I had a dol. I am real lonesum. wil you send mee a dol. My naim is Nansy Peck, and I live to Mis Roxy Blair's house in Baset Vermonte. I nit this mittin. when I am big I wil pay for the dol.
The letter once written, and waved up and down under the desk to dry, the paper was pinned into her pocket again, and when the next pair of mittens she knit were done, pressed, caught together with a bit of yarn, and sent up, by her, to the trunk, the daring and odd little note was slipped safely inside one of them, and lay there several months undiscovered.