Maria looked at her lump of bread with its triangular portion of butter set forth on the bare board, and wept. This was what she had come to, she, Maria Stickly, who had always throughout her long, honest, struggling life held up her head with the best! She bowed it now on her poor sunken chest, and sobbed aloud.
A long skinny hand presently hovered over her discarded portion, and her elder neighbour said, with a titter and a cunning look:—
“If ’ee don’t want it, ye’ll p’r’aps have no objection to my taking of it.”
And on its owner making no sign the transfer speedily took place.
“Nay now, that bain’t fair!” whispered the woman on the other side, angrily; “I claim half. Her and me was a-speaking together first.”
They began to quarrel over the food, while Maria sobbed on between them; the sight of their inflamed faces and the sound of their angry, coarse words seemed to her to aggravate the indignity.
“The food be thrown down to us like dogs,” she said to herself, “an’ they be a-fightin’ over it like dogs!”
Presently the altercation attracted the attention of some one in authority, and the matter was inquired into, the fact being elicited that the new-comer had disdained her appointed portion.
“I haven’t never been used to take my meals wi’out no plate!” she protested with a burst of woe, for her outraged self-respect gave her courage. “There must be plates here—folks couldn’t eat their dinner wi’out no plates, and if ’tis along o’ the washin’ up, there be a-many women here as could do it; I’d do it myself!”
But she was told not to give herself such airs. When people came to the Union they mustn’t be so particular—she must be content to do as others did. Plates indeed! there were no plates there, not even coffin plates!
This joke was duly appreciated, but it fell on poor old Maria’s bewildered ears with an ominous sound, as it were a knell of final doom. “Not even coffin plates!” she murmured to herself; and her tears ceased falling, and she sat gazing vaguely at the wrinkled hands clasped in her lap. “Not even coffin plates!” Her actual misery had hitherto prevented her from dwelling on that last inevitable end, but now it seemed to stare her in the face. A pauper’s grave—that was what awaited her, as surely as death itself.