'A spade! a rake! a hoe!

A pickaxe or a bill!

A hook to reap, or a scythe to mow,

A flail, or what ye will--

And here's a ready hand

To ply the needful tool,

And skill'd enough, by lessons rough,

In Labour's rugged school.'

HOOD.

Higgins's door was locked the next day, when they went to pay

their call on the widow Boucher: but they learnt this time from

an officious neighbour, that he was really from home. He had,

however, been in to see Mrs. Boucher, before starting on his

day's business, whatever that was. It was but an unsatisfactory

visit to Mrs. Boucher; she considered herself as an ill-used

woman by her poor husband's suicide; and there was quite germ of

truth enough in this idea to make it a very difficult one to

refute.

Still, it was unsatisfactory to see how completely her

thoughts were turned upon herself and her own position, and this

selfishness extended even to her relations with her children,

whom she considered as incumbrances, even in the very midst of

her somewhat animal affection for them. Margaret tried to make

acquaintances with one or two of them, while her father strove to

raise the widow's thoughts into some higher channel than that of

mere helpless querulousness. She found that the children were

truer and simpler mourners than the widow. Daddy had been a kind

daddy to them; each could tell, in their eager stammering way, of

some tenderness shown some indulgence granted by the lost father.

'Is yon thing upstairs really him? it doesna look like him. I'm

feared on it, and I never was feared o' daddy.'

Margaret's heart bled to hear that the mother, in her selfish

requirement of sympathy, had taken her children upstairs to see

their disfigured father. It was intermingling the coarseness of

horror with the profoundness of natural grief She tried to turn

their thoughts in some other direction; on what they could do for

mother; on what--for this was a more efficacious way of putting

it--what father would have wished them to do. Margaret was more

successful than Mr. Hale in her efforts. The children seeing

their little duties lie in action close around them, began to try

each one to do something that she suggested towards redding up

the slatternly room.

But her father set too high a standard, and

too abstract a view, before the indolent invalid. She could not

rouse her torpid mind into any vivid imagination of what her

husband's misery might have been before he had resorted to the

last terrible step; she could only look upon it as it affected

herself; she could not enter into the enduring mercy of the God

who had not specially interposed to prevent the water from

drowning her prostrate husband; and although she was secretly

blaming her husband for having fallen into such drear despair,

and denying that he had any excuse for his last rash act, she was

inveterate in her abuse of all who could by any possibility be

supposed to have driven him to such desperation. The masters--Mr.

Thornton in particular, whose mill had been attacked by Boucher,

and who, after the warrant had been issued for his apprehension

on the charge of rioting, had caused it to be withdrawn,--the

Union, of which Higgins was the representative to the poor

woman,--the children so numerous, so hungry, and so noisy--all

made up one great army of personal enemies, whose fault it was

that she was now a helpless widow.




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