"Poore wee thing," he said in an undertone, "poore wee thing." He put the hands as he found them. Still looking at the little baby face he added:
"Heigho, heigho, it's bad, purty bad, but it's worse where there isn't even a dead wan!"
When Anna returned she lay down on her bed, dressed as she was, and Jamie and Withero kept the vigil—with the door barred. Next morning at the earliest respectable hour Withero carried the little coffin under his arm and Jamie walked beside him to the graveyard.
During the fifteen years that followed the burial of "the famine child" they buried three others and saved three—four living and four dead.
I was the ninth child. Anna gave me a Greek name which means "Helper of men."
Shortly after my arrival in Scott's entry, they moved to Pogue's entry. The stone cabin was thatch-covered and measured about twelve by sixteen feet. The space comprised three apartments. One, a bedroom; over the bedroom and beneath the thatch a little loft that served as a bedroom to those of climbing age. The rest of it was workshop, dining-room, sitting-room, parlor and general community news center. The old folks slept in a bed, the rest of us slept on the floor and beneath the thatch. Between the bedroom door and the open fireplace was the chimney-corner. Near the door stood an old pine table and some dressers. They stood against the wall and were filled with crockery. We never owned a chair. There were several pine stools, a few creepies (small stools), and a long bench that ran along the bedroom wall, from the chimney corner to the bedroom door. The mud floor never had the luxury of a covering, nor did a picture ever adorn the bare walls. When the floor needed patching, Jamie went to somebody's garden, brought a shovelful of earth, mixed it and filled the holes. The stools and creepies were scrubbed once a week, the table once a day. I could draw an outline of that old table now and accurately mark every dent and crack in it. I do not know where it came from, but each of us had a hope that one day we should possess a pig. We built around the hope a sty and placed it against the end of the cabin. The pig never turned up, but the hope lived there throughout a generation!
We owned a goat once. In three months it reduced the smooth kindly feeling in Pogue's entry to the point of total eclipse. We sold it and spent a year in winning back old friends. We had a garden. It measured thirty-six by sixteen inches, and was just outside the front window. At one end was a small currant bush and in the rest of the space Anna grew an annual crop of nasturtiums.
Once we were prosperous. That was when two older brothers worked with my father at shoemaking. I remember them, on winter nights, sitting around the big candlestick—one of the three always singing folk-songs as he worked. As they worked near the window, Anna sat in her corner and by the light of a candle in her little sconce made waxed ends for the men. I browsed among the lasts, clipping, cutting and scratching old leather parings and dreaming of the wonderful days beyond when I too could make a boot and sing "Black-eyed Susan."
Then the news came—news of a revolution.
"They're making boots by machinery now," Anna said one day.