The Solitary Summer

When she came back to get the dinner ready, the baby was still crowing placidly in its perambulator, and the little Elizabeth, with all the clothes burnt off her body, was lying near the grate dead. Of course the mother was wild with grief, distracted, raving, desperate, and of course all the other women were shocked and horrified; but point the moral as we might, we could not bring them to see that it was an avoidable misfortune with nothing whatever to do with the Finger Gottes, and the mothers who preferred locking their babies up alone to sending them to be looked after, went on doing so as undisturbed as though what had occurred could in no wise be a lesson to themselves. "Pray, Herr Lehrer, why are those two little boys sitting over there on that seat all by themselves and not singing?" I asked at the conclusion of the hymn. "That, gracious lady, is the vermin bench. It is necessary to keep--" "Oh yes, yes--I quite understand--good afternoon. Good-bye, children, you have sung very nicely indeed." "Now," said I to myself, when I was safely out in the street again, "I am going home." "Oh, not yet," at once protested my unmanageable conscience; "your favourite old woman lives in the next cottage, and surely you are not going to leave her out?" "I see plainly," I replied, "that I shall never be quite comfortable till I have got rid of you" and in I went to the next house.