First Words

It was the spring of 1800. Old people yet can tell of the hard
famine of that year. The harvest of the autumn before had failed;
the war and the corn laws had brought the price of corn up to a
famine rate; and much of what came into the market was unsound, and
consequently unfit for food, yet hungry creatures bought it eagerly,
and tried to cheat disease by mixing the damp, sweet, clammy flour
with rice or potato meal. Rich families denied themselves pastry and
all unnecessary and luxurious uses of wheat in any shape; the duty
on hair-powder was increased; and all these palliatives were but as
drops in the ocean of the great want of the people.

Philip, in spite of himself, recovered and grew stronger; and as he
grew stronger hunger took the place of loathing dislike to food. But
his money was all spent; and what was his poor pension of sixpence a
day in that terrible year of famine? Many a summer's night he walked
for hours and hours round the house which once was his, which might
be his now, with all its homely, blessed comforts, could he but go
and assert his right to it. But to go with authority, and in his
poor, maimed guise assert that right, he had need be other than
Philip Hepburn. So he stood in the old shelter of the steep, crooked
lane opening on to the hill out of the market-place, and watched the
soft fading of the summer's eve into night; the closing of the once
familiar shop; the exit of good, comfortable William Coulson, going
to his own home, his own wife, his comfortable, plentiful supper.
Then Philip--there were no police in those days, and scarcely an old
watchman in that primitive little town--would go round on the shady
sides of streets, and, quickly glancing about him, cross the bridge,
looking on the quiet, rippling stream, the gray shimmer foretelling
the coming dawn over the sea, the black masts and rigging of the
still vessels against the sky; he could see with his wistful, eager
eyes the shape of the windows--the window of the very room in which
his wife and child slept, unheeding of him, the hungry,
broken-hearted outcast. He would go back to his lodging, and softly
lift the latch of the door; still more softly, but never without an
unspoken, grateful prayer, pass by the poor sleeping woman who had
given him a shelter and her share of God's blessing--she who, like
him, knew not the feeling of satisfied hunger; and then he laid him
down on the narrow pallet in the lean-to, and again gave Sylvia
happy lessons in the kitchen at Haytersbank, and the dead were
alive; and Charley Kinraid, the specksioneer, had never come to
trouble the hopeful, gentle peace.