ing an' don't know
anything."

She was too simple and too unknowing to speculate on the loss of her
beauty, which would have brought her competency once,--if sold in the
right market. As she lay in her little attic bed, she was still
sullenly thinking, wearily thinking of her life. She thought of a poor
old horse which Sim had bought once, years before, and put to the
plough when it was too old and weak to work. She could see her again
as in a vision, that poor old mare, with sad head drooping, toiling,
toiling, till at last she could no longer move, and lying down under
the harness in the furrow, groaned under the whip--and died.

Then she wondered if her own numbness and despair meant death, and she
held her breath to think harder upon it. She concluded at last,
grimly, that she didn't care--only for the children.

The air was frightfully close in the little attic, and she heard the
low mutter of the rising storm in the west. She forgot her troubles a
little, listening to the far-off gigantic footsteps of the tempest.

_Boom, boom, boom_, it broke nearer and nearer as if a vast cordon of
cannon was being drawn around the horizon. Yet she was conscious only
of pleasure. She had no fear. At last came the sweep of cool, fragrant
storm-wind, a short and sudden dash of rain, and then in the cool,
sweet hush which followed, the worn and weary woman fell into a deep
sleep.

When she woke the younger children were playing about on the floor in
their night-clothes, and little Pet was sitting in a square of
sunshine intent on one of his shoes. He was too young to know how poor
and squalid his surroundings were, the patch of sunshine flung on the
floor glorified it all. He (little animal) was happy.

The poor of the western prairies lie almost as unhealthily close
together as do the poor of the city tenements. In the small hut of the
peasant there is as little chance to escape close and tainting contact
as in the coops and dens of the North End of proud Boston. In the
midst of oceans of land, floods of sunshine and gulfs of verdure, the
farmer lives in two or three small rooms. Poverty's eternal cordon is
ever round the poor.

"Ma, why didn't you sleep with pap last night?" asked Bob, the
seven-year old, when he saw she was awake at last. She flushed a dull
red.

"Sh! Because--I--it was too warm--and there was a storm comin'. You
never mind askin' such questions. Is he gone out?"

"Yup. I heerd him callin' the pigs.