Dilly Danforth, the poor washerwoman, had seen better days; but the drunken dissipation of a husband, who was now in his grave, had reduced her to abject, despairing poverty. Her unfortunate marriage and persistence in clinging to the man of her choice, and enduring all his abuses, excited the displeasure of her family, and they cast her from them to suffer and struggle on as best she might. She knew not as she had a relative in the world. She surely had no friend, save Willie, her little boy, with whom she dwelt in the comfortless abode we have briefly visited.
Alas for the suffering poor! How prone are the wealthy, by warm, glowing grates, to forget their cheerless habitations, and turn inhumanly from their pitiful tales of want and destitution!
"This work-day world, this work-day world, How it doth plod along!"
Tap, tap, tap, on the back kitchen door of Esq. Pimble's great brick mansion, and a clattering of plates and tea things within which quite drowned the timid knock. A second and louder one brought a fat, red-faced woman with rolled-up sleeves and a dish-towel in hand, to answer the summons.
"Sakes, Dilly Danforth!" exclaimed she, on beholding the well-known, faded blanket of the washerwoman; "what brings you here so airly in the mornin'? If you are after cold victuals, I can tell you you can't have any, for mistress--"
"I am not come seeking charity," said Dilly, cutting short the woman's brawling speech; "Mr. Pimble wished me to come and wash for him to day."
"_He_ did?" said the bold-visaged housekeeper, opening her large, buttermilk-colored eyes with astonishment; "well, for sure!"--and here she seemed debating some matter in her mind for several moments, her hand still holding the door in forbidding proximity to poor Mrs. Danforth's pale, grief-worn face.
"Well, you can come in then, I s'pose," she said, at length, flinging it open spitefully, and returning to the wiping of her breakfast dishes, which she sent together with such a crash, that poor Dilly, as she stood over the stove trying to warm her chilly fingers by a decaying fire, momentarily expected to see them scattered over the floor in a thousand fragments.
"Sakes! are you cold this warm spring morning?" snarled the plump, well-fed housekeeper, as she thumped back and forth, carrying her piles of plates to the cupboard. "Why don't you shut the outside door after you, then? For my part, I'm most roasted to death."