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 privations. 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 petulant despair, with the ignominy of a
criminal accusation, with all the sordid concomitants of arrest and
the jail, was infinitely terrible to his unaccustomed imagination. He
revolted from its contemplation with a personal application. For an
honest man, however poor, feels all the high prerogatives of honor.

There was a step in the shed-room where Ross Gilhooley had lurked and
listened. His wrath now spent, his mind had traveled the obvious course
to his son's conclusion