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 north and east sides of the house, he had a hundred and eighteen dollars left, most of which would have to go to buy another horse. Fortunately the corn crop was a fairly good one that year.

It was a hard winter, a winter of pinching and skimping and doing without, doing without sugar, doing without coffee, doing without even the salt meat to which they were accustomed, for hogs were worth too much to be consumed at home. They had to be sold to meet the exorbitant cost of shoes and overalls and underwear to keep the children warm.

Since the beginning of the war these things had become of very inferior quality. It seemed as if Jerry was always cobbling the boys' shoes and Judith always putting patches on their overalls. And in an incredibly short time their feet were on the ground again and their knees out. Like all the rest of the women, Judith pinched and contrived, tried to make clothes for the children out of old garments that were fit only for the ragbag, made flour sacks into pillow slips and even into underwear and carefully saved the smaller pieces of everything for the bedquilts that were always wearing out and having to be replaced.

As she sat by the little glass lamp of an evening making over flour sacks or mending overalls, her face had not the dull, sullen look that Jerry remembered from other times, but rather a hard, grim, half defiant expression. Watching her covertly his own face took on an ugly look.

More and more, as the days went by, she was confirmed in the stand that she had taken after getting up from her last sickbed. She was through forever, she told herself, with having children and with running any risk of having children. She wanted no more children that she could not clothe, that she could hardly feed, that were a long torture to bear and a daily fret and anxiety after they were born. Her flesh recoiled and her spirit rose in fiery protest against any further degradation and suffering. Too long she had been led along blindly. Now her eyes were open and she would be a tool no more of man's