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.

"You hush, will yeh? 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. It's Sunday, ain't it, ma?"

The fact seemed to startle her.

"Why, yes, so it is! Wal! Now, Sadie, you jump up an' dress quick 's y'
can, an' Bob an' Sile, you run down an' bring s'm' water," she
commanded, in nervous haste, beginning to dress. In the middle of the
room there was scarce space to stand beneath the rafters.

When Sim came in for his breakfast he found it on the table, but his
wife was absent.

"Where's y'r ma?" he asked, with a little less of the growl in his
voice.

"She's upstairs with Pet."

The man ate his breakfast in dead silence, till at last Bob ventured to
say:--

"What makes ma ac' so?"

"Shut up!" was the brutal reply. The children began to take sides with
the mother--all but the oldest girl, who was ten years old. To her the
father turned now for certain things to be done, treating her in his
rough fashion as a housekeeper, and the girl felt flattered and docile
accordingly.

They were pitiably clad; like many farm-children, indeed, they could
hardly be said to be clad at all. Sadie had on but two garments, a sort
of undershirt of cotton and a faded calico dress, out of which her bare,
yellow little legs protruded, lamentably dirty and covered with
scratches.

The boys also had two garments, a hickory shirt and a pair of pants like
their father's, made out of brown denim by the mother's never-resting
hands--hands that in sleep still sewed, and skimmed, and baked, and
chur