A Sheaf of Corn

by Mary E. Mann

"God! What a fool I've been," he said. "And what the devil am I to do now?"

Two or three letters lay beside his plate; he flicked them apart with his shaking finger. "Bills—bills—bills!" he said. "All bills!"

Unopened, he chucked them one by one into the fire, but stopped at the last. "A lawyer's fist," he said, regarding the ominously legal-looking hand-writing. "Someone threatening proceedings again. Let 'em proceed!"

He was about to throw that communication also in the fire, but paused in the act, and laid it down by his plate again, putting another plate on the top of it to conceal it from his sight.

He took up the knife, old and worn and sharpened at the point, which lay by the loaf of bread, and looked at its edge.

"This is how poor old Fleming got out of the scrape," he said. "And Fleming wasn't in a worse hole than I am."

But he turned the knife upon the bread instead of his own throat, and having begun with an expression of distaste upon the salt fish, his appetite arrived with eating, and, that dish disposed of, he attacked the buttered eggs, and found himself in a fair way to make a good meal. For, in spite of his intemperate habits, he had an invariably good appetite—an almost indomitable cheerfulness also. The inability to take himself and his misfortunes seriously had been at the bottom of all his failures. With his family history and his temperament he was foreordained to disaster; but he met it smiling, with the courage which was more the outcome of indifference than of heroism.

"Which is the way to the workhouse, Polly?" he inquired of the little lodging-house servant who came to clear the table.

He had filled his pipe and had turned his chair to the fire. His blue eyes shone as brightly, his red hair was watered as carefully free of curl, his person was as neat and spruce and daintily cared for as if he had been the most immaculate of mothers' sons.

Polly, at her first place, and with an unbounded admiration and regard for the lodger who, if he did make a sight of work splashing about in his bath, was always free with his shillings and full of his fun, looked at the young man distrustfully.