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78 about in the dark. Then they found it and snapped it twice.

“What’s the matter?”

“We have no lights.”

Kudo spoke in a slightly irritated tone. The light had been cut off two months previously. Kudo had not enough money to buy candles. In the evening they would send the children out to the neighbours, and go themselves to the union. They had lived like that for sixty days now. “Bright lamps are the best adornment for rooms,” said the advertisements in the shops for electrical goods.

“Hush, children, they won’t eat you,” said Kudo, laughing. His wife, Oyoshi, tried to soothe them, too.

“There’s nothing to be frightened about, these gentlemen come to see us quite often now.”

So, one after another, the children stopped crying. These visits were indeed no new thing to them.

Kudo’s comrades from the union had asserted, more than once, that Oyoshi was developing class-consciousness in her children. As a matter of fact, their upbringing was not carried on along any definite principles. Life itself educated them.

Oyoshi’s hands hung down to her knees and seemed too large and heavy, like the claws of a crab. Dirt had eaten into her skin, which had grown as coarse and rough as a potato-grater. She never washed now.

In the course of her short life Oyoshi had more than once discovered who were her “enemies.” When her husband joined the union this knowledge