and the poor people had less
coal to burn. Storm succeeded storm; then, when there came a warm
spell, there was an epidemic of the grippe, and doctors' bills to
pay and quinine to buy--and quinine was very dear.

The Brewsters managed to keep up the interest on the house mortgage,
but their living expenses were reduced to the smallest possible
amount. In those days there was no wood laid ready for kindling in
the parlor stove, since there was neither any wood to spare nor
expectation of Robert's calling. Ellen and her mother sat in the
dining-room, for even the sitting-room fire had been abolished, and
they heated the dining-room whenever the weather admitted it from
the kitchen stove, and worked on the wrappers for their miserable
pittance.

The repeated storms were in a way a boon to Andrew, since he got
many jobs clearing paths, and thus secured a trifle towards the
daily expenses.

In those days Mrs. Zelotes watched the butcher-cart anxiously when
it stopped before her son's house, and she knew just what a tiny bit
of meat was purchased, and how seldom. On the days when the cart
moved on without any consultation at the tail thereof, the old woman
would buy an extra portion, cook it, and carry some over to her
son's.

Times grew harder and harder. Few of the operatives who had struck
in Lloyd's succeeded in obtaining employment elsewhere, and most of
them joined the union to enable them to do so. There was actual
privation. One evening, when the strike was some six weeks old, Abby
Atkins came over in a pouring rain to see Ellen. There were a number
of men in the dining-room that night. Amos Lee and Frank Dixon were
among them. It was a singular thing that Andrew, taking, as he had
done, no active part in any rebellion against authority, should have
come to see his house the headquarters for the rallies of
dissension. Men seemed to come to Andrew Brewster's for the sake of
bolstering themselves up in their hard position of defiance against
tremendous odds, though he sat by and seldom said a word. As for
Ellen, she and her mother on these occasions sat out in the kitchen,
sewing on the endless seams of the endless wrappers. Sometimes it
seemed to the girl as if wrappers enough were being made to clothe
not only the present, but future generations of poor women. She
seemed to see whole armies of hopeless, overburdened women, all
arrayed in these slouching garments, crowding the foreground of the
world.

That ev