University of Virginia Library

23. CHAPTER XXIII.
A CHARITABLE INSTITUTION.

WHEN Ralph got back to Miss Nancy Sawyer's,
Shocky was sitting up in bed talking
to Miss Nancy and Miss Semantha. His cheeks
were a little flushed with fever and the excitement
of telling his story; theirs were wet with tears.

“Ralph,” whispered Miss Nancy, as she drew him into the
kitchen, “I want you to get a buggy or a sleigh, and go right
over to the poor-house and fetch that boy's mother over here.
It'll do me more good than any sermon I ever heard to see
that boy in his mother's arms to-morrow. We can keep the
old lady over Sunday.”

Ralph was delighted, so delighted that he came near kissing
good Miss Nancy Sawyer, whose plain face was glorified by
her generosity.

But he did not go to the poor-house immediately. He waited
until he saw Bill Jones, the Superintendent of the Poor-House,
and Pete Jones, the County Commissioner, who was still somewhat

shuck up, ride up to the court-house. Then he drove
out of the village, and presently hitched his horse to the poor-house
fence, and took a survey of the outside. Forty hogs,
nearly ready for slaughter, wallowed in a pen in front of the
forlorn and dilapidated house; for though the commissioners
allowed a claim for repairs at every meeting, the repairs
were never made, and it would not do to scrutinize Mr. Jones's
bills too closely, unless you gave up all hope of a renomination
to office. One curious effect of political aspirations in Hoopole
County, was to shut the eyes that they could not see, to
close the ears that they could not hear, and to destroy the
sense of smell. But Ralph, not being a politician, smelled the
hog-pen without and the stench within, and saw everywhere the
transparent fraud, and heard the echo of Jones's cruelty.

A weak-eyed girl admitted him, and as he did not wish to
make his business known at once, he affected a sort of idle
interest in the place, and asked to be allowed to look around.
The weak-eyed girl watched him. He found that all the women
with children, twenty persons in all, were obliged to sleep in
one room, which, owing to the hill-slope, was partly under
ground, and which had but half a window for light, and no
ventilation, except the chance draft from the door. Jones
had declared that the women with children must stay there—
“he warn't goin' to have brats a - runnin' over the whole
house.” Here were vicious women and good women, with
their children, crowded like chickens in a coop for market.
And there were, as usual in such places, helpless, idiotic women
with illegitimate children. Of course this room was the scene
of perpetual quarreling and occasional fighting.

In the quarters devoted to the insane, people slightly demented

and raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while
there were also those utter wrecks which sat in heaps on the
floor, mumbling and muttering unintelligible words, the whole
current of their thoughts hopelessly muddied, turning around
upon itself in eddies never ending.

“That air woman,” said the weak-eyed girl, “used to holler
a heap when she was brought in here. But pap knows how
to subjue 'em. He slapped her in the mouth every time she
hollered. She don't make no furss now, but jist sets down that
a-way all day, and keeps a-whisperin'.”

Ralph understood it. When she came in she was the victim
of mania; but she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy.
Indeed this state of incurable imbecility seemed the end toward
which all traveled. Shut in these bare rooms, with
no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food, cases
of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy.

One young woman, called Phil, a sweet-faced person, apparently
a farmer's wife, came up to Ralph and looked at him
kindly, playing with the buttons on his coat in a child-like
simplicity. Her blue-drilling dress was sewed all over with
patches of white, representing ornamental buttons, and the
womanly instinct toward adornment had in her taken this childish
turn.

“Don't you think they ought to let me go home?” she said
with a sweetness and a wistful, longing, home-sick look, that
touched Ralph to the heart. He looked at her, and then at
the muttering crones, and he could see no hope of any better
fate for her. She followed him round the barn-like rooms,
returning every now and then to her question, “Don't you think
I might go home now?”

The weak-eyed girl had been called away for a moment, and
Ralph stood looking into a cell, where there was a man with
a gay red plume in his hat and a strip of red flannel about
his waist. He strutted up and down like a drill-sergeant.

“I am General Andrew Jackson,” he began. “People don't
believe it, but I am. I had my head shot off at Bueny Visty,
and the new one that growed on isn't nigh so good as the

old one; it's tater on one side. That's why they take advantage
of me to shut me up. But I know some things. My
head is tater on one side, but it's all right on t'other. And
when I know a thing in the left side of my head, I know it.
Lean down here. Let me tell you something out of the left
side. Not out of the tater side, mind ye. I wouldn't a-told
you if he hadn't locked me up fer nothing. Bill Jones is a
thief! He sells the bodies of the dead paupers, and then
sells the empty coffins back to the county agin. But that
a'n't all —”

Just then the weak-eyed girl came back, and, as Ralph
moved away, General Jackson called out: “That a'n't all. I'll
tell the rest another time. And that a'n't out of the tater
side, you can depend on that. That's out of the left side.
Sound as a nut on that side!”

But Ralph began to wonder where he should find Hannah's
mother.

“Don't go in there!” cried the weak-eyed girl, as Ralph
was opening a door. “Ole Mowley's in there, and she'll cuss you.”

“Oh! well, if that's all, her curses won't hurt,” said Hartsook,
pushing open the door. But the volley of blasphemy
and vile language that he received made him stagger. The old
hag paced the floor, abusing everybody that came in her way.
And by the window, in the same room, feeling the light that
struggled through the dusty glass upon her face, sat a sorrowful,
intelligent English woman. Ralph noticed at once that
she was English, and in a few moments he discovered that her
sight was defective. Could it be that Hannah's mother was
the room-mate of this loathsome creature, whose profanity and
obscenity did not intermit for a moment?

Happily the weak-eyed girl had not dared to brave the curses
of Mowley. Ralph stepped forward to the woman by the window,
and greeted her.

“Is this Mrs. Thomson?”

“That is my name, sir,” she said, turning her face toward
Ralph, who could not but remark the contrast between the
thorough refinement of her manner and her coarse, scant, unshaped
pauper-frock of blue drilling.

“I saw your daughter yesterday.”

“Did you see my boy?”

There was a tremulousness in her voice and an agitation in
her manner which disclosed the emotion she strove in vain to
conceal. For only the day before Bill Jones had informed
her that Shocky would be bound out on Saturday, and that
she would find that goin' agin him warn't a payin' business,
so much as some others he mout mention.

Ralph told her about Shocky's safety. I shall not write
down the conversation here. Critics would say that it was an
overwrought scene. As if all the world were as cold as they!
All I can tell is that this refined woman had all she could
do to control herself in her eagerness to get out of her prison-house,
away from the blasphemies of Mowley, away from the
insults of Jones, away from the sights and sounds and smells
of the place, and, above all, her eagerness to fly to the little
shocky-head from whom she had been banished for two years.
It seemed to her that she could gladly die now, if she could
die with that flaxen head upon her bosom.

And so, in spite of the opposition of Bill Jones's son, who
threatened her with every sort of evil if she left, Ralph
wrapped Mrs. Thomson's blue drilling in Nancy Sawyer's shawl,

and bore the feeble woman off to Lewisburg. And as they drove
away, a sad, childlike voice cried from the gratings of the upper
window, “Good-by! good-by!” Ralph turned and saw that it
was Phil, poor Phil, for whom there was no deliverance. And
all the way back Ralph pronounced mental maledictions on the
Dorcas Society, not for sending garments to the Five Points or
the South Sea Islands, whichever it was, but for being so blind
to the sorrow and poverty within its reach. He did not know,
for he had not read the reports of the Boards of State Charities,
that nearly all alms-houses are very much like this, and that
the State of New York is not better in this regard than Indiana.
And he did not know that it is true in almost all other
counties, as it was in his own, that “Christian” people do not
think enough of Christ to look for him in these lazar-houses.

And while Ralph denounced the Dorcas Society, the eager,
hungry heart of the mother ran, flew toward the little white-headed
boy.

No, I can not do it; I can not tell you about that meeting.
I am sure that Miss Nancy Sawyer's tea tasted exceedingly
good to the pauper, who had known nothing but cold water for
years, and that the bread and butter were delicious to a palate
that had eaten poor-house soup for dinner, and coarse poor-house
bread and vile molasses for supper, and that without
change, for three years. But I can not tell you how it seemed
that evening to Miss Nancy Sawyer, as the poor English lady
sat in speechless ecstasy, rocking in the old splint-bottomed
rocking-chair in the fire-light, while she pressed to her bosom
with all the might of her enfeebled arms, the form of the
little Shocky, who half-sobbed and half-sang, over and over
again, “God ha'n't forgot us, mother; God ha'n't forgot us.”