In the field
below more than a score of ragged men, women and children were
scratching and digging among piles of ashes, eagerly searching for and
gathering up the half-burned cinders; searching, too, in the forlorn
hope of finding something of greater value that might have been thrown
away by accident. The rain beat noisily on the window pane and the
priest shivered as he looked at those scantily-clad little children, not
one of whom could boast of shoes and stockings, and at the white heads
and bent figures of old women on whose unprotected shoulders the rain
fell so pitilessly. What mattered the inclemency of the weather to them?
Winter would be here by and by; they must gather in all the fuel
possible before it was upon them with its snow and sleet and icy blasts.
In fact, even when winter came, many of these same little children and
old women, even grown men who either could not find other work to do or
did not care to seek it, many of these same people would be seen day
after day scratching and digging in this same field of ashes.
The priest turned from the window with a sigh of pity for the miserable
creatures below. His glance strayed over the untidy kitchen which bore
all the marks of the most extreme poverty and he gave another sigh of
pity for the man who had been brought so low in the last days of his
life, the man whom he had known in the time of his success and
prosperity.
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