the difference was, the man had wound up the first half~
way and the second all the way, and showed the customer
how the latter made twice as much noise; upon which the
customer remarked that he was a sound sleeper, and had
better take the more expensive clock!

There is a poet who sings that:

/tab\"Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing,
/tab\Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died."

But it is not likely that he had reference to the kind of an~
guish that comes with destitution, that is so endlessly bitter
and cruel, and yet so sordid and petty, so ugly, so humiliat~
ing -- unredeemed by the slightest touch of dignity or even
of pathos. It is a kind of anguish that poets have not
commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into
the vocabulary of poets -- the details of it cannot be told
in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one
expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature
by telling how a family found their home alive with ver~
min, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and hu~
miliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money
they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesi~
tation and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a
big package of insect-powder -- a patent preparation which
chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth
which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it
had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which
had the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so
got their inwards set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The
family, having no idea of this, and no more money to throw
away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one
more misery for the rest of their days.

Then there was old Antanas. The winter came, and
the place where he worked was a dark, unheated cellar,
where you could see your breath all day, and where your
fingers sometimes tried to freeze. So the old man's cough
grew every day worse, until there came a time when it
hardly ever stopped, and he had become a nuisance about

[[90]]

p089 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p090w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p091

v?