onotony of
mind as hers--the mind, that very principle of physical youthfulness.
Save only that it can also kill the body ere it age it; either by too
great rankness breaking down at once the framework on which it has been
reared, or afterward causing this to give way slowly under the fruitage
of thoughts, too heavy any longer to be borne.

That from so dark a receptacle as this mother there should have emerged
such a child of light, was one of those mysteries that are the
perpetual delight of Nature and the despair of Science. This did not
seem one of those instances--also a secret of the great Creatress--in
which she produces upon the stem of a common rose a bud of alien
splendor. It was as if potter's clay had conceived marble. The
explanation of David did not lie in the fact that such a mother had
produced him.

One of the truest marks of her small, cold mind was the rigid tyranny
exercised over it by its own worthless ideas. Had she not sat beside
her son while he ate, had she not denied herself the comfort of the
fireside in the adjoining room, in order that she might pour out for
him the coffee that was unfit to be drunk, she would have charged
herself with being an unfaithful, undutiful mother. But this done, she
saw no further, beheld nothing of the neglect, the carelessness, the
cruelty, of all the rest, part of which this very moment was outspread
beneath her eyes.

For at the foot of the table, where David's father had sat, were two
partly eaten dishes: one of spare-rib, one of sausage. The gravy in
each had begun to whiten into lard. Plates heaped with cornbread and
with biscuit, poorly baked and now cold, were placed on each side. In
front of him had been set a pitcher of milk; this rattled, as he poured
it, with its own bluish ice. On all that homely, neglected board one
thing only put everything else to shame. A single candle, in a low,
brass candlestick in the middle of the table, scarce threw enough light
to reveal the scene; but its flame shot deep into the golden,
crystalline depths of a jar of honey standing close beside it--honey
from the bees in the garden--a scathing but unnoticed rebuke from the
food and housekeeping of the bee to the food and housekeeping of the
woman.

Work in the hemp fields leaves a man's body calling in every tissue for
restoration of its waste. David had hardly taken his seat before his
eye swept the prospect before him with savage hope. In him was the
hunger, not of