e were all swathed about with
petticoats and shawls. They had no movement. Their feet were like
those of no creature he had ever observed. One could hear the
flip-flap of their slippers all over the place, and at all hours. They
were down-at-heel, draggle-tailed, and futile. There was no
workmanship about them. They were as unfinished, as unsightly as a
puddle on a road. They insulted his eyesight, his hearing, and his
energy. They had lank hair that slapped about them like wet seaweed,
and they were all talking, talking, talking.

The mother was of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her
cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and
the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the
window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the
circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep
ditch and as ugly. She slid here and there with her head on one side
like an inquisitive hen watching one curiously, and was always doing
nothing with an air of futile employment. The youngest was a
semi-lunatic who prattled and prattled without ceasing, and was always
catching one's sleeve, and laughing at one's face.--And everywhere
those flopping, wriggling petticoats were appearing and disappearing.
One saw slack hair whisking by the corner of one's eye. Mysteriously,
urgently, they were coming and going and coming again, and never, never
being silent.

More and more he went running to the public-house. But it was no
longer to be among men, it was to get drunk. One might imagine him
sitting there thinking those slow thoughts without words. One might
predict that the day would come when he would realise very suddenly,
very clearly all that he had been thinking about, and, when this
urgent, terrible thought had been translated into its own terms of
action, he would be quietly hanged by the neck until he was as dead as
he had been before he was alive.

SWEET-APPLE

At the end of the bough, at the top of the tree
(As fragrant, as high, and as lovely as thou)
One sweet apple reddens which all men may see,
At the end of the bough.

Swinging full to the view, tho' the gatherers now
Pass, and evade, and o'erlook busily:
Overlook! nay, but pluck it! they cannot tell how.

For it swings out of reach as a cloud, and as free
As a star, or thy beauty, which seems too, I vow,
Remote as the sweet rosy apple--ah me!
At the en