"
"All these things taken from the poor?" asked Hulda. "How many miseries
they tell!"
"Mr. Cannon," said Levin, "what kin you do with 'em? People won't buy
'em. They're just a-rottin' to pieces."
"We keep' em to show all them who trespass on Isaac and Jacob Cannon,"
answered Marius, with easy grandeur, "that there is a judgment-day!"
Hulda's long-lashed gray eyes, with a look of more than childish
contempt, accompanied her words:
"I should think you would fear that day, Mr. Cannon, when you say the
prayer, 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us.'"
The wind from the river seemed to bend the old warehouse, and the noise
it made through the chinks and around the corners, slightly stirring the
loosely disposed pile of cottage and hut comforts, seemed to arouse low
wails among these as when they were torn from the chimney side and the
family.
"Where is my baby?" the cradle seemed to say, "that I received and
rocked warm from the womb of pain? Oh, I am hungry for his little
smile!"
"Why do I rest my busy wheel?" the spinner seemed to creak, "when I know
my children are without stockings? Who keeps me here idle while Mother
asks for me?"
"Where is the old gray head," sighed the feathers, sifting in the breeze
from a broken pillow-case, "that every night and in the afternoons dozed
on our bag of down, and picked us over once a year, and said her prayers
in us? Oh, is she sleeping on the cold, bare floor, and we so useless!"
The pot seethed to the kettle, "It is dinner-time, and the little boys
are crying for food, and still there is no one to lift me on the crane
and start the fire beneath me! What will they think of me, they gathered
around so many years and watched me boil, and poked their little fingers
in to taste the stewing meat? I want to go! I want to go!"
The kettle answered to the pot: "I never sung since the constable forced
me from grandmother's hand, and robbed her of the cup of tea.
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