Gratia's Trials — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

36 | GRATIA’S TRIALS. neath his pillow. Gratia, too, slept a heavy, unresting sleep, all unconscious, poor girl, that it was her last peaceful slumber beneath her father’s roof-tree. Joe Johnson was on his way, the next morning, bright and early ; but when the Kempfield family were sitting down to their midday meal of boiled pork and cabbage, with baked potatoes and a boiled Indian pudding, yellow and steaming from its bag, they were surprised—some members of it, at least—to see the old man’s face re-appearing on their threshold with a perplexed, frightened look. ‘‘Just in time for dinner, Mr. Johnson,” said Almira, smil- ingly, jumping up for an additional plate, although the surprise had brought a deep color to her cheek, and evidently startled her nerves somewhat. ‘‘Sit down, and take a bite with us, won't you?” — *You hain’t forgot nothin’, have you, Joe?” said Mr. Kemp- field, with a choice wedge of pork uplifted on the end of his two-tined fork, midway to his mouth, ‘I don’t fairly know whether I have or not,” said the peddler, sitting down and wiping his heated brow with a spotted silk pocket-handkerchief, ‘‘ That twenty-dollar bill I had here last night—it dropped on the floor, you remember, and Gracia, there, picked it up.” “Ves, I remember,” said Mr. Kempfield., ‘Well, I can’t find it nowheres !” ““You don't say so!” said Ira, bolting the piece of pork, and. dropping both knife and fork, ‘‘I know it was in my pocket-book last night, for I counted 3 all my money over in my room the last thing before I went tc — _ bed, and I never opened it agin till I got to Squire Martin’s, and then it warn’t there.” ‘Maybe it’s in your room, lyin’ about somewhere,” sug- _ gested Ira, ‘‘T don't see how it could be,” said Joe, ‘‘for I remember puttin’ it away in the inside flap, and bucklin’ it with the little -Comicbooks: co =|