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"What did she say to this?"

"Oh!" said widow Prescott, "she took it rather hard that she couldn't have the boys longer with her, and provide homes for them such as she might approve."

"And don't the selectmen give a mother here that privilege, pray?" inquired Miss Flush.

"No, indeed, they do not," said aunt Wakeup.

"They always consult with her," said Mrs. Prescott.

"They do not force from her the children abruptly, so to speak, but they finally do with them as they think best." (29)

"That is, I believe, the rule they follow," said Mr. Rodman.

"Well, is it not a hard one?" inquired she.

"We should think so," said Mrs. Rodman.

"I never saw or heard of the thing before," said Miss Flush. "And pray where is Mrs. Upham?"

"She is rocking herself in the chair there, and James and Alice are talking with her," said Mrs. Rodman.

"How really sorrowful she looks," replied Miss Flush.

"Mrs. Upham was a pleasant and happy wife, with a good home that was all lost by her husband's intemperance and gambling. She came here with those two children left her out of a family of seven sons and daughters, and it seems cruel to take them -- still, this is no place for them," said Mrs. Rodman.

"You are certainly right," replied the other. "How I wish all odious laws were swept away, and every wicked custom of society abandoned! What dreadful woes have followed and rested on man, in consequence of indulging the vices you have named."

Mrs. Wakeup and widow Prescott now fell into conversation with Miss Flush, and she became deeply interested in their personal history as they gave it off to her, and in hearing them speak of their religious support in afflictions.

Miss Peters said little to the visitors, but she groaned and wept, and hoped her days of suffering would shortly end. She longed to hide herself in the grave, the recollections of her "past life were too agonizing to bear." "Pray for me," said she, "pray! pray!" and covered her face with her hands.

On the side of a dull looking, narrow bed, in the west room, where a half dozen persons lived crowded into its corners and filling all its area, there sat both Mr. and Mrs. John Pepper, late "the rich old Peppers" worth their hundreds of thousands, the envy and abuse of money lovers and seekers, and disappointed worldlings, now town paupers of Crampton, penniless, wretched, friendless, clear down the ladder of respectability and fortune, broken on the wheel of misfortune. (30)

They seemed ashamed of themselves -- and what was worse, horrified with a sense of their condition -- it had come upon them! The apprehension of a life of poverty had seized them at the last, and had come in all its severity without a moment's warning -- save that every rustling of the leaves was one, and every rumor of trouble and tightness in the money market was another -- yea, every want of life an admonition to expect the poor-house!

They hung down their heads in abject, dismal shame as Mr. Rodman came near to console with them; for it was one more proof in the series that they had fallen.

Henceforth, all approaches to them to speak words of even Christian comfort, would be turned into the stings of scorpions, as demonstration sure that they had now come to want the very things they had through life denied themselves, though fully able to enjoy them. They could no longer, even in idea, boast themselves above other men; but henceforth poverty and haggard want were to them stern, unflinching verities. But Mr. and Mrs. Pepper, in every other sense than the necessity of poverty, had lived for years as paupers do. They had denied themselves all wantonness in delicacies; superfluity of even simple and daily necessities they carefully avoided; and their ever-earnest study, more intense in their old age than ever, was how they might reduce the cost of their most imperious daily wants. Still, it was not for love of these conditions that they thus wantonly and perversely fought against their natural instincts and in-bred desires. No! It was out of a grown-up idea of the dreadfulness of poverty, which was almost sure to overtake them -- a cherished form of misery that became in them a thorough demon of monomaniac horror and trembling -- a mere fancy, that made them personally cruel -- an idle whim, founded in the apprehension of a state possible to them, but by no means probable -- it being generally the result of intemperance, vice, extravagance, thriftlessness -- that caused them to go hungry and athirst when others envied them their riches.