Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/501

Rh other day a man told me such a tale of horror—a sick family, and a jail staring him in the face, that I gave him my last money—my carefully hoarded money, and of what use are those cattle to me? None whatever. You may have them for your land, if you like. I have nothing else."

"I will have them," said the man." On a distant station I know where I could sell them, if I could only leave my family. But they have no flour, no tea, nothing but meat, meat, meat."

"Leave them to me," said Uriah, feeling the warm blood and the spirit of humanity beginning to circulate in his bosom at the sense of what was really suffering around him. "Leave them to me. I will care for them. Your wife and children shall have a doctor. I will find you some provisions for your journey, and if ever your land is worth anything, you shall have it again. This state of things makes monsters of us. It turns our blood into gall, our hearts into stones. We must resist it or we are ruined, indeed!"

"Nay," said the man, "I won't impose upon you. Take that piece of land in the valley there; it will one day be valuable."

"That?" said Uriah, looking. "That! Why, that is a swamp! I will take that—I shall not hurt you there!" And he laughed outright, the first time for two years.

Years went on, and my brother Uriah lived on, but as it were in the valley of the shadow of death. It was a melancholy and dispiriting time. The buoyancy of his soul was gone. That jovial, sunny, ebullient spirit with which he used to come home from the city in England, had fled, as a thing that had never been. He maintained himself chiefly out of his garden. His children were springing up into long lanky lads and lasses. He educated them himself, as well as he could; and as for clothes! Not a navvy—not a beggar—in the streets of London, but could have stood a comparison with them, to their infinite disparagement. Ah! those good three thousands pounds! How will the balance stand in my brother Uriah's books at the end of the next twenty years!

But anon there woke a slight motion in the atmosphere of life. It was a mere flutter of the air, that died out again. Then again it revived—it strengthened—it blew