enumerated Medora,
"the loom an' the candle-moulds."

"The cheers his dad made fur his mam whenst they begun housekeepin',"
said Jane Gilhooley's muffled voice.

"The press an' the safe," Medora continued.

"The pot an' the oven," chokingly responded the apron.

"The churn an' the piggins!"

"The skillet an' the trivet!"

Medora, fairly flinching from the inventory of all the household goods,
so desecrated and "leveled on," returned to the salient incident of the
day. "Dad jes' tuk an axe an' bust up every yearthly thing in the
house!"

"An' now we-uns ain't got nuthin'." The elder woman looked about in
stunned dismay, her little black eyes a mere gleam of a pupil in the
midst of their swollen lids and network of wrinkles.

One of the miseries of the very ignorant is, paradoxically, the partial
character of their privation. If the unknown were to them practically
non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But
even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery of
wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished
sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an
inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the
benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an
unperceived, unimagined aegis. Thus there was hardly an article in the
house which was not exempt by statute from execution, and the house
itself and land worth only a hundred or two dollars were protected by
the homestead law. The facetious deputy, Clem Tweed, with "Christmas in
his bones," would have committed a misdemeanor in seriously levying upon
them. He had held the affair as a capital farce--even affecting with
wild, appropriating gambols to seize the baby and the cat--and fully
realized that malice only had prompted the whole proceeding, to
humiliate Ross Gilhooley and illustrate the completeness of the victory
which Peter Petrie had won over his enemy.

The younger Gilhooley, however, quaked as his limited intelligence laid
hold on the fact that if the law had permitted a levy on the household
goods to satisfy the judgment of Peter Petrie their destruction was in
itself a balking of the process, resistance to the law, and with an
unimagined penalty.

"We-uns hev got ter git away from hyar somehows!" he said with decision.

The idea of bluff Ross Gilhooley in the clutches of the law because of
one fierce moment of goaded and petulan