And grudge the very muck to hap ye.
All this bitterness had reason and fact to excuse it, and it is a wonder that such feelings, fermenting in strong minds, did not lead to more serious consequences than taproom talk and the formation of Chartist clubs.
In such surroundings, what was the character and career of Thom himself? An active mind led him to the perusal of such books as came in his way, and a poetical temperament made him deeply sensitive to the suffering and degradation of his condition, while it gave him a stimulus toward the fleeting pleasures of dissipation and the glow of sociability and popularity among his fellows. He was without the determined energy to rise above his condition, which might have succeeded had an exceptional strength been allied with his mental gifts, in spite of the forlorn circumstances; and he appears to have been, if not content, at least to have submitted to be only the popular genius among the workmen of his factory, and the leader in the taproom gatherings with his social and musical gifts. He wrote songs in imitation of those which he heard, one of which, to his great delight, appeared in the poet's corner of an Aberdeen newspaper. The story which he tells is that on the morning after the poem had been dropped into the mail box, he and a companion waited around the door of the publication office, endeavoring in vain to induce some charitable purchaser to let them have a peep at the contents of the paper, only succeeding at last by crowding the holder of a copy into an entry way and examining the columns by force, being absolutely without the penny with which to buy one. But this success did not stimulate him with any hope of advantage by literature, and he regarded his gift of song writing, like his skill with the flute, as simply the means for his own enjoyment and the amusement of his associates, his ambition shut in within his own little world of squalor and destitution. In appearance he was below the middle stature, and with a club foot, so that physical deformity weighed upon him, as well as the miserable conditions of his life, and made him more sensitive as well as hopeless. For seventeen years he bent over the looms in the School Hill factory, and then removed to the small hamlet of Newtyle, near Dundee, where a cotton factory had been recently established. He now had a family of a wife and four children. In the commercial crash of 1836, after he had been there but a short time, the factory was suspended, only sufficient work being found for the operatives with families to allow them five shillings a week. Five shillings a week for six persons meant starvation and creeping death, "an empty armry and a cold hearthstone." Thom and his family waited week after week, "hoping that times would mend," and with no prospect before them, if they abandoned their miserable pittance, but roadside beggary. He gives the picture of the scene that drove them to the latter alternative.
"Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o'clock, but our little dwelling shows none of the signs of that time of day. The four children were still asleep. There is a bed cover hung before the window to keep all within as much like night as possible; and the mother sits beside the beds of her children to lull them back to sleep whenever any one shows an inclination to awake. For this there is a cause, for our weekly five shillings have not come as expected, and the only food in the house consists of a handful of oatmeal saved from the supper of last night. Our fuel is also exhausted.
"My wife and I were conversing in sunken whispers about making an attempt to cook the handful of meal, when the youngest child awoke beyond its mother's power to hush it again to sleep, and then fell a-whimpering, and finally broke out in a steady scream, rendering it impossible any longer to keep the rest in a state of unconsciousness. Face after face sprang up, each with one consent exclaiming, 'Oh, mither, mither, gie me a piece.'"
The family took to the road, leaving the key of the miserable tenement with the landlord, in the hope of being eventually able to return to a home like that. By the sale to a pawnbroker in Dundee of "some relics of better days,"—one can hardly imagine what relics or what days,—a small pack of cheap hawker's goods was procured for the wife, and four shillings' worth of books for the husband, to try to sell, but they can only have been the flimsiest disguise for the necessity of depending upon charity. The tramp began, the mother carrying the youngest child on her breast, and often bearing the next youngest also, who was unable to follow the weary road the whole distance. Sunset was followed by cold, sour east winds and rains. At nine o'clock they arrived at a comfortable farmhouse, where they were refused shelter, in the absence of the proprietor. All beseeching of the housekeeper was in vain, and the husband returned to the family, who had crept closer together, and were all asleep except the mother.
"Oh, Willie, Willie, what keepit ye. I'm dootfu'o' Jeanie; is na she waesome like? Let's in frae the cauld."
"We 've nae wae to gang, lass, whate'er come o' us. Yon folk winnae hae us."
After cowering under a wet mantle in despair for a time, another effort was made. The husband wrote a note by the fast fading light, asking for shelter, and endeavored to have it taken in at a gentleman's mansion near by. It was refused, but a farm laborer was touched by the spectacle of the forlorn family, crouching shelterless in the cold and rain, and took them to a neighboring farmhouse, where they were warmed and fed in the servants' quarters, and put to rest in beds of straw and bagging in an outhouse. Between three and four o'clock the father was wakened by the deadly scream of the mother, who had wakened to find her infant dead by her side, its little life having been worn out by the cold, hunger, and fatigue of the previous day. Amid the wailing of the children, and in the benumbing anguish of the blow, the most vivid remembrance of that moment to the father was the watching of the wheeling and fluttering of a colony of swallows, their fellow-lodgers, who had been awakened by the outcries.
From perfect grief there need not be