She soon appeared,—a gaunt woman, with a wrinkled visage, and a constant sniff.
"Land sakes!" she cried, upon hearing Jasper's ill news, "Yeouw don't say! Well, well, it's a disposition o' Providence, to be sure!" by which she doubtless meant a dispensation, though it did not much matter, for no one paid the slightest attention to her moral axioms just then.
By this time the news had spread, and the neighbors were flocking to the afflicted cottages; for all the drowned men had lived in Killamet, and were well known, while each had left a wife, mother, or some weeping female relative, to mourn his loss.
But all agreed that the Olmstead case was hardest, or, if they did not, Mrs. Updyke took pains to impress that idea upon them with a decisive sniff; for, being a next-door neighbor, she naturally desired that the affliction close by should outrank all other distress in the village.
But, finding Sara oblivious just now to everything but her grief, she left her to pace back and forth, wringing her hands and moaning like some caged creature, contenting herself with telling the children "they could mourn for their poor pa jest as well with less noise," while she prepared to receive the sympathetic callers with an intense satisfaction, which the solemnity of the occasion could not quench.
"Yes, it's a awful visitation," she sniffed, as the curious, friendly women flocked in; "I don't know's I ever hearn tell of a harrowin'er! Four orphans, with no pa nor ma!" (Sniff, sniff.) "Molly, when that babby squirms so, is it pins or worms?"
"He wants Sara," sobbed the poor child, whose laughter and dimples were now all drowned in tears.
But Sara, unheeding of everybody, still kept up that wild walk back and forth, back and forth, every groan seeming wrenched from her very soul; and poor baby had to squirm,—and stand it.
Ah! that is a lesson that comes almost with our first breath!
"Poor child!" said one little dumpling of a woman. "Let me take him home: he'll be amused with my Johnnie, I know. Come baby!" and, managing at length to coax him away, she took him to more cheerful surroundings, where he was soon quite as happy sucking a peppermint lozenge, and watching Johnnie with his toys, as if no father lay buried under the cruel, restless sea.