was really more painful and trying to her than her sickness had been. The doctor told us we must take her away from the city; but how could we do that? By this time Bernard was free to go day by day into the blazing streets, where business was stagnant and friends absent, to eat out his heart in misery and mortification, looking for work. For it mortified him deeply to find himself so helpless. There was so little he could do. He had been educated for a lawyer, and lawyers do not pick up cases on the street, nor is it to their credit to beg for them. Our one anchor was my salary as organist, and this was but little, compared with our needs. It is not well to go into the details of the privations in the little house, but we were more unhappy and more helpless than any of God's creatures ought to be, for it does sometimes happen that the tide comes in and catches us at the foot of a cliff up which we cannot climb, and we are neither birds to fly nor fish to swim.
And then in the middle of August Juliet's second child was born, and again she was very ill. We now indeed had trouble, which we had to take with set teeth, and this time we had sore hearts; for, what with mortifications and privations, and, at last, debt, even Bernard began to lose energy and faith. He was not used to struggle, nor to the worrying, mean expedients with which we now were tormented. I was desperate, and it seemed to me that my very muscles tightened as I resolved that poverty should never get the better of us and spoil our lives. Curiously enough, Juliet now became the hopeful, cheery one. Her little boy brought back her smiles, and it amused her to see how dark his eyes grew, and how black his hair. She declared him a Spaniard, and gave him his grandfather's name of Ferdinand; and as I heard her softly murmuring her tender caressing talk to him, I could fancy little Sophie back again.
It used to amuse us sometimes, for we had not lost the power of viewing our misfortunes in prospective, to see how few resources we had. We were not at all like the heroes of novels, who always have jewels to sell, for we owned none; and no friend ever sent us an envelope with two or three hundred pounds in it; and neither did an uncle die when we were at the worst, and leave us all his property. We used to talk of these possibilities and resolve what we would do when any one of them should happen; and it was true, as Juliet once declared with a little tremble in her voice, that the first thing Bernard and I thought of was something to cure her.
It came to be September, hot and dry. The streets were dusty and ill of odor, and the very air seemed to weary in staleness and want of vitality. And we were very poor. I had paid our rent, and had gone home tired out and weak, with twenty-five cents in my pocket and two peaches in my hand. On my way I stopped and bought a loaf of bread, and I carried it into the kitchen, where I found Juliet sitting on a chair, looking very pale.
"Janet," she said, "there is not a thing to eat in this house."
"But there is," I replied. "Bread, peaches and chicken, and tea,—and lots."
"I see the bread; but the chicken!—oh, Janet!"
