“Writing! writing! writing! Thank God, Andrew Carson, the pen will soon drop from your fingers with starvation.”
The woman said this in a half-screaming, but weak and broken-down voice.
“Mother, let me have some peace,” said the young writer, turning his face away, so that he might not see her red glaring eyes fixed on him.
“Ay, Andrew Carson, I say thank God that the force of hunger will soon now make you drop that cursed writing. Thank God, if there is the God that my father used to talk about in the long nights in the bonnie highland glen, where it’s like a dream of lang syne that I ever lived.”
She pressed her hands on her breast, as if some recollections of an overpowering nature were in her soul.
“The last rag in your trunk has gone to the pawn; you have neither shirt, nor coat, nor covering now, except what you’ve on. Write—write—if you can, without eating; to-morrow you’ll have neither meat nor drink here, nor aught now to get money on.”
“Mother, I am in daily expectation of receiving something for my writing now; the post this evening may bring me some good news.”
He said this with hesitation, and there was little of hope in the expression of his face.
“Good news! good news about your writing! that’s the good news ’ill never come; never, you good-for-nothing scribbler!”
She screamed forth the last words in a voice of frenzy. Her tone was a mixture of Scotch and Irish accents. She had resided for some years of her earlier life in Ireland.