Seth's Brother's Wife: A Study of Life in the Greater New York

CONTENTS


Ef ther’ ain’t a flare-up in this haouse ’fore long, I miss my guess,” said Alvira, as she kneaded the pie-crust, and pulled it out between her floury fingers to measure its consistency. “Ole Sabriny’s got her back up this time to stay.”
“Well, let ’em flare, says I. ’Taint none o’ aour business, Alviry.”
“I knaow, Milton; but still it seems to me she might wait at least till th’ corpse was aout o’ th’ haouse.”
“What’s thet got to dew with it?”
The callousness of the question must have grated upon the hired-girl, for she made no reply, and slapped the dough over on the board with an impatient gesture.
It was near the close of a fair day, late in May, and the reddened sunlight from the West would have helped to glorify any human being less hopelessly commonplace than Milton Squires as he sat in its full radiance on the doorstep, peeling and quartering apples over a pan which he held between his knees. This sunlight, to reach him, painted with warm tints many objects near at hand which it could not make picturesque. The three great barns, standing in the shadow to the south, were ricketty and ancient without being comely, and the glare only made their awkward outlines and patched, paintless surfaces the meaner; the score of lean cows, standing idly fetlock-deep in the black mire of the barnyard, or nipping the scant tufts of rank grass near the trough, seemed all the dingier and scrawnier for the brilliancy of the light which covered them; the broken gate, the bars eked out with a hop-pole, the wheelbarrow turned shiftlessly against a break in the wall, the mildewed wellcurb, with its antiquated reach—all seemed in this glow of dying day to be conscious of exhibiting at its worse their squalid side. The sunset could not well have illumined, during that hour at least, a less inspiring scene than this which Alvira, looking out as she talked, or the hired man, raising his head from over the apples, could see from the kitchen door of Lemuel Fairchild’s farm-house. But any student of his species would have agreed that, in all the uninviting view, Milton was the least attractive object.