em all next day. For a man out of
work there was not a dollar of credit at the little village store; and
work! why, there was only one kind of work at which money could be
earned in that district in the winter.

When his wife took Number Eleven's cradle into the other room, she
heard him, through the thin partition of upright boards, pasted over
with newspapers, moving round in the dim red flickering fire-light
from the stove-grating.

The children were all asleep, or pretending it; Number Ten in the big
straw bed, where she lay always between her parents; Number Eleven in
her cradle beside; Nine crosswise at the foot; Eight, Seven, Six,
Five, and Four in the other bed; One, Two, and Three curled up,
without taking off their miserable garments, on the "locks" of straw
beside the kitchen stove.

Mary Ann knew very well what Peter was moving round for. She heard him
groan, so low that he did not know he groaned, when he lifted off the
cover of the meal barrel, and could feel nothing whatever therein. She
had actually beaten the meal out of the cracks to make that last pot
of mush. He knew that all the fish he had salted down in the summer
were gone, that the flour was all out, that the last morsel of the pig
had been eaten up long ago; but he went to each of the barrels as
though he could not realize that there was really nothing left. There
were four of those low groans.

"O God, help him! do help him! please do!" she kept saying to
herself. Somehow, all her sufferings and the children's were light to
her, in comparison, as she listened to that big, taciturn man groan,
and him sore with the hunger.

When at last she came out, Peter was not there. He had gone out
silently, so silently that she wondered, and was scared. She opened
the door very softly, and there he was, leaning on the rail fence
between their little rocky plot and the great river. She closed the
door softly, and sat down.

There was a wide steaming space in the river, where the current ran
too swiftly for any ice to form. Peter gazed on it for a long while.
The mist had a friendly look; he was soon reminded of the steam from
an immense bowl of mush! It vexed him. He looked up at the moon. The
moon was certainly mocking him; dashing through light clouds, then
jumping into a wide, clear space, where it soon became motionless, and
mocked him steadily.

He had never known old John Pontiac to jeer any one, but there was his
face in that moon,--Peter m