THE THEFT OF A CHILDHOOD
The Watts children were up the next morning by four o'clock.
Mrs. Watts ate, always, by candle-light. The sun, she thought, would be dishonored, were he to find her home in disorder, her breakfast uncooked, her day's work not ready for her, with his first beams.
For Mrs. Watts did not consider that arising at four, and cooking and sweeping and tidying up the cabin, and quarreling with the Bishop as “a petty old bundle of botheration”—and storming around at the children—all by sun-up—this was not work at all.
It was merely an appetizer.
The children were aroused by her this morning with more severity than usual. Half frightened they rolled stupidly out of their beds—Appomattox, Atlanta, and Shiloh from one, and the boys from another. Then they began to put on their clothes in the same listless, dogged, mechanical way they had learned to do everything—learned it while working all day between the whirl of the spindle and the buzz of the bobbin.
The sun had not yet risen, and a cold gray mist crept up from the valley, closing high up and around the wood-girdled brow of the mountain as billows around a rock in the sea. The faint, far-off crowing of cocks added to the weirdness; for their shrill voices alone broke through the silence which came down with the mist. Around the brow of Sand Mountain the vapor made a faint halo—touched as it was by the splendid flush of the East.
It was all grand and beautiful enough without, but within was the poverty of work, and the two—poverty and work—had already had their effect on the children, except, perhaps, Shiloh. She had not yet been in the mill long enough to be automatonized.
Looking out of the window she saw the star setting behind the mountain, and she thought it slept, by day, in a cavern she knew of there.