ere there, who could read in each other's faces too truly the
gloom and anguish that darkened the brow and wrung the heart. The
strong man, who had been not long-before a comfortable farmer, now stood
dejected and apparently broken down, shorn of his strength, without a
trace of either hope or spirit; so wofully shrunk away too, from his
superfluous apparel, that the spectators actually wondered to think that
this was the large man, of such powerful frame, whose feats of strength
had so often heretofore filled them with amazement. But, alas! what will
not sickness and hunger do? There too was the aged man--the grand-sire
himself--bent with a double weight of years and sorrow--without food
until that late hour; forgetting the old pride that never stooped
before, and now coming with, the last feeble argument, to remind the
usurer that he and his father had been schoolfellows and friends,
and that although he had refused to credit his son and afterwards his
daughter-in-law, still, for the sake of old times, and of those who were
now no more, he hoped he would not refuse his gray hairs and tears, and
for the sake of the living God besides, that which would keep his son,
and his daughter-in-law, and his famishing grandchildren, who had not
a morsel to put in their mouths, nor the means of procuring it on
earth--if he failed them.

And there was the widower, on behalf of his motherless children, coming
with his worn and desolate look of sorrow, almost thankful to God that
his Kathleen was not permitted to witness the many-shaped miseries of
this woful year; and yet experiencing the sharp and bitter reflection
that now, in all their trials--in his poor children's want and
sickness--in their moanings by day and their cries for her by night,
they have not the soft affection of her voice nor the tender touch of
her hand to soothe their pain--nor has he that smile, which was ever
his, to solace him now, nor that faithful heart to soothe him with its
affection, or to cast its sweetness into the bitter cup of affliction.
Alas! no; he knows that her heart will beat for him and them no more;
that that eye of love will never smile upon them again; and so he feels
the agony of her loss superadded to all his other sufferings, and in
this state he approaches the merciless usurer.

And the widow--emblem of desolation and dependence--how shall she meet
and battle with the calamities of this fearful season? She out of whose
heart these very