Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, story by Alice Hegan Rice, published in 1901 under her maiden name, Alice Caldwell Hegan.

Mrs. Nancy Wiggs, who lives in a ramshackle house in the “Cabbage Patch,” a city tenement section along the railroad tracks, is a middle‐aged widow with two sons, Jim and Billy, and three daughters, Asia, Australia, and Europena. They live amid hardships and dire poverty, but “the substance of her philosophy lay in keeping the dust off her rose‐colored spectacles.” When Jim dies, the family is aided by wealthy Lucy Olcott, and later by her former fiancé, Robert Redding. Through the intervention of these two, and by their own persistent endeavors, the Wiggses maintain life and optimism. They are able to repay their benefactors by causing their reconciliation, and when the people of the Cabbage Patch gather to celebrate Mrs. Wiggs's fiftieth birthday, Robert and Lucy come to announce their approaching marriage. The widow concludes, “Looks like ever' thing in the world comes right, if we jes' wait long enough!”