of white lying in confusion over his wrinkled forehead and cheeks, his
whole air squalid, hopeless, and degraded,--not so much by the poverty
of vice as by its demoralizing stamp penetrating from the inner to the
outer man, and levelling it even below the plane of brutes that perish.

"Good-day! good-day!" said he to his son's wife, in a squeaking,
tremulous tone, that drove the child to his mother's arms,--"Abner to
home?"

"No, Sir," said Hitty, with an involuntary shudder, that did not escape
the bleared blue eye that fixed its watery gaze upon her.

"Cold, a'n't ye? Better go in, better go in! Come, come along! How d'e
do, little feller? don't know yer grandper, hey?"

The child met his advances with an ominous scream, and Hitty hurried
into the house to give him to the servant's charge, while she returned
to the sitting-room, where the old man had seated himself in the
rocking-chair, and was taking a mental inventory of the goods and
chattels with a momentary keenness in his look that no way reassured
Hitty's apprehensive heart.

"So, Abner a'n't to home?"

"No, Sir."

"Don't know where he's gone, do ye?"

"No, Sir."