The cottage was an unpainted wooden shell, and, like it, the corn-crib and pig-pen and little barn beyond seemed tottering to a fall. Faded leaves of a woodbine, that climbed upon the cottage, were thick about the door-way, and lay strewn by the wind upon the bare floor within. There was but one room on the ground floor, and a stove and a sewing-machine and a small wooden chest were all its furniture. I knocked at the open door. Through an opposite one, communicating with a lean-to, a woman appeared. She was large and muscular, but in her face was the sickly pallor of ill-nourishment, and her hair was dishevelled, and the loose, ragged dress which she wore was covered with dark, greasy stains.
I asked for bread and milk; she explained that the family had just finished dinner, but that she could give me something, if I would wait, and she invited me to a seat on the chest.
I drew from my pack an unfinished newspaper, and as I read I could feel innumerable eyes upon me. Through the cracks in the door, and the ragged breaks in the plaster, came the inquisitive gaze of children's eyes, and I could hear their eager whispers as a swarm of children crowded one another for possession of the best peep-holes.
Their mother asked me in, and set before me, on a table littered with remnants of dinner, a pitcher of fresh milk and some huge slices of coarse bread, a large yellow bowl, and a pewter tablespoon. The children stared at me as I ate, and I tried to form an accurate estimate of their number, but despaired when, after I thought that I had distinguished eight, I found my estimate upset by sudden apparitions of faces hitherto unrecognized. The oldest child seemed not more than twelve, and the youngest lay asleep in a cradle near the stove, where its mother could rock it as she worked. They all were as ragged and dirty as the children of the slums, but they had nothing of the vivacity of these, nor of the quick adjustment to changing circumstances which gives to children, bred upon the street, their first hold upon your interest.
Stolid and wide-eyed they stood about the room, intently watching me, moving here and there for new points of view; until their mother, who had showed no wish to talk as she washed the dishes, now broke the silence with a sounding cuff upon the ear of a little boy, as, with a loud command, she sent him sobbing into the back yard to fetch her wood.
The children scattered instantly, except a little girl with flaxen hair and grotesquely dirty face, who clung to her mother's skirts, and seemed to hamper her immeasurably; the more so as the baby had wakened in the noise, and had begun to cry. I grew sick with fear of what was coming next, but the mother's mood had changed; for catching the crying baby in her arms, she almost smothered it with kisses, and sitting down she fondled it, and gently stroked the head of the child beside her.
It was a veritable country slum, with nearly all the barren squalor of a crowded tenement. You thought of life in it as some hard necessity, from which all choice and spontaneity are gone. And so in great part it must have been, and the wonder was the stronger at sight of the instinct of mother love, springing like a living fountain in an arid plain.
The village of Benton wore a preoccupied air when I entered it. I soon found the cause in an auction sale of horses in the stable-yard of the tavern. The horses huddled close, as if for common protection, in an angle formed by the buildings. They were watched by a mounted rider, whose duty it was to prevent any from breaking loose. A small crowd of farmers and village men, all of them coatless and in their working clothes, formed a semicircle about the animals. The surrounding doors and windows were full of women's faces, alive with interest in the progress of events; and children perched upon the fences, or dodged in and out among the groups of men. A fat and ruddy auctioneer walked back and forth excitedly before the crowd, loudly repeating a call for bids; or having caught one, running it rapidly through changes of inflection and intonation, until a fresh bid started him anew on his flight of varying tones, which ended at last in the dying cadences of "Going! going! gone!"
Presently I found a man who was so far unoccupied by the sale as to have leisure to direct me on my way. Taking his advice I started for Union Church and Unityville. In the outskirts of Benton, as I left the village, an urchin sat upon the door-step of a cottage, idly beating about him with a stick, consoling himself apparently as best he could for not having been allowed to go to the sale. The sight of a tramp with a pack upon his back diverted him; and far as the sound could carry there came following me, as I climbed the hill beyond the village, his shouts of "Git there, Eli!"
The contrast with Monday's march appeared at once on Tuesday morning. The clouds which were threatening when I made an early start grew more threatening while I walked on, and they broke in torrents of rain as I entered Lairdsville, with Williamsport still twenty-four miles away.