Poor Hannah pressed her hand upon her throbbing heart, and struggled
with the tears that rose to her eyes and seemed scalding her very eye
balls with their burning heat. There was a choking sensation in her
throat, but she swallowed it back, and prepared supper in the best
manner she was capable. Her husband seated himself at the table, took
a biscuit, looked at it, flung it back upon the plate, called his tea
dish water, and throwing back his chair hastily, left the table.
But why dwell upon the sorrowful years they spent together? He ever
came like a dark shadow upon the sunlight of home. Children gathered
around their fire side, but there was no gentle corner for them in his
heart.
His only son was ever with him like his shadow, drinking in his
precepts, practising his examples, breathing his oaths, domineering
over his mother and sisters, and a terror to the neighborhood.
His father telling him, he was in hopes to see the time he would dance
on Dr. Somers' grave, as he hated him with a perfect hatred, because
he had been his wife's attending physician, when she had been sick
during the years they had lived together.
James, for such was the name of the son, was instructed to hate
everybody that came in his way, and, of course, was hated by every
one.
The money that came by gambling, went in the same way, and
poverty--abject poverty--was now an inmate of their dwelling.
The house remained unfinished; the frame, which had never been
clap-boarded, had gone to decay in a great measure; and when one meal
was obtained, they scarcely knew where another would come from.
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