Mrs. Hamlin was too infirm to climb the hill to the
meeting-house, and Perez' mood was more inclined to blood-spilling
than to God's worship. All day he walked the house, his fists
clenched, muttering curses through his set teeth, and looking not
unlike a lion, ferociously pacing his cage. For his mother was
tearfully relating to him the share of the general misery that had
fallen to their lot, as a family, in the past nine years, how Elnathan
had not been able to carry on his farm, without the aid of the boys,
and had run behind, till now, Solomon Gleason the schoolmaster, had
got hold of the mortgage, and was going to turn them into the street,
that very week. But all this with the mother, as with the brother, was
as nothing, compared with Reuben's imprisonment and sickness unto
death.
It was Mrs. Hamlin, who did most of the talking, and much of what she
said fell unheeded on Perez' ears, as he walked unceasingly to and fro
across the kitchen. For his mind was occupied with all the intensity
of application, of which it was capable, with the single point,--how
he was to get Reuben out of jail. Even the emergency, which would so
soon be raised, by the selling out of the homestead, and the turning
of the family into the street, was subordinated, in his mind, to this
prime question.
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