Sleeping Waters Author:Ernest George Henham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III MISTY HOURS r I "HE morning brought letters to Anger: one from JL Billacott, full of questions and exclamations, making it not unlike a piece of ... more »music; and another from Mary Wiggaton upon business. She desired to know what was to be done with an old woman and her broken-down husband, who were about to be evicted from their precarious tenancy of one room, and were even then calling upon St. Joseph and Father Jack to rescue them from the State, the landlord, and the workhouse. She also enclosed a document which looked insanitary, but was human : a sheet of paper, dirty and much folded, from both sides of which signatures, with crosses scrawled for such, had been propagated without forcing beneath a neatly written invocation, praying for the return of the young shepherd to his flock. No doubt the appeal was selfish; the field of clover was more in the mind of the sheep than he who had guided them with the crook ; they missed the hand which found rent more than the tongue which recited well-worn phrases; but they also felt the need of the sympathetic presence which had given itself with words of consolation. The appeal, however, did not reach " Father Jack " ; it fell into the hands of one Anger, a countryman, and was by him received with feelings of annoyance. These people wanted him back merely to dip their fingers into his pockets ; he had spoilt them, and they in return had tried to spoil him. While he grew weaker not a single voice had begged him to make better provision for lu's own body ; allhad whined on and begged for more. Anger's new nature thought contemptuously of these shameless mendicants, these tattered and too often idle Teutons, as he compared them to the independent Celts around him; men such as Jonas Hard, who lived with pride of majesty in a hovel,...« less