"An' so what that half-drunk dep'ty, Clem Tweed, calls an execution war leveled!" exclaimed Jane Gilhooley, her veiled head swaying forlornly as she sobbed invisibly.
"But Dad 'lowed ez Peter Petrie shouldn't hev none o' his gear," Medora's eyes flashed with a responsive sentiment.
"His gran'mam's warpin' bars!" suggested the elder woman.
"The spinnin'-wheels she brung from No'th Carliny," enumerated Medora, "the loom an' the candle-moulds."
"The cheers his dad made fur his mam whenst they begun housekeepin'," said Jane Gilhooley's muffled voice.
"The press an' the safe," Medora continued.
"The pot an' the oven," chokingly responded the apron.
Medora, fairly flinching from the inventory of all the household goods, so desecrated and "leveled on," returned to the salient incident of the day. "Dad jes' tuk an axe an' bust up every yearthly thing in the house!"
"An' now we-uns ain't got nuthin'." The elder woman looked about in stunned dismay, her little black eyes a mere gleam of a pupil in the midst of their swollen lids and network of wrinkles.
One of the miseries of the very ignorant is, paradoxically, the partial character of their privation. If the unknown were to them practically non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery of wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an unperceived, unimagined aegis. Thus there was hardly an article in the house which was not exempt by statute from execution, and the house itself and land worth only a hundred or two dollars were protected by the homestead law. The facetious deputy, Clem Tweed, with "Christmas in his bones," would have committed a misdemeanor in seriously levying upon them. He had held the affair as a capital farce--even affecting with wild, appropriating gambols to seize the baby and the cat--and fully realized that malice only had prompted the whole proceeding, to humiliate Ross Gilhooley and illustrate the completeness of the victory which Peter Petrie had won over his enemy.