Chapter 8 - Page 2

tone.

Henry obeyed, trembling all the while. This foot exhibited nearly the same marks of the progress of the painful disease.

"What have you done for it?" asked Sharp, looking Henry in the face with a scowl.

"Nothing but to put a little candle-grease on it at night before I went to bed," replied the child.

"Come out here with me. I'll doctor you," said his master, turning away and disappearing through the back door. Henry followed as quickly as he could walk on his bare feet, that seemed ready to give way under him at ever step. When he got as far as the kitchen, he found Sharp waiting for him in the door.

"Here, jump out into that snow-bank!" said he, pointing to a pile of snow that had been shoveled up only that morning, after a fall through the night, and lay loose and high.

The poor boy looked down at his crippled, and, indeed, bleeding feet, and, as may well be supposed, hesitated to comply with the peremptory order.

"Do you hear, sir?" exclaimed his master, seizing him by the collar, and pushing him out into the yard. Then catching him by one arm, he set him in the centre of the snow-bank, his naked feet and legs going down into it some twelve or eighteen inches.

"Now stand there until I tell you to come out!"

The child did not scream, for he had already learned to bear pain without uttering even the natural language of suffering; although the agony he endured for the next minute was terrible. At the end of that time, a motion of the head of his master gave him to understand that the ordeal was over.

"Now take that bucket of cold water, and let him put his feet into it," said he to a little girl they had just taken to raise, and who stood near the kitchen window, her heart almost ready to burst at the cruelty inflicted upon the only one in the house with whom she had a single feeling in common.

The girl quickly obeyed, and sat down on the floor beside the bucket of water. She handled tenderly the blood-red feet of the little boy, ever and anon looking up into his face, and noting with tender solicitude, the deep lines of suffering upon his forehead.

"There, that will do," said Sharp, who stood looking on, "and now run up stairs and get a better pair of stockings for Henry."

"What do you want with a better pair of stockings?" said Mrs. Sharp, a few moments after, bustling down into the kitchen.

"Why, I want them for Henry," replied her husband.

"Want them for Henry!" she exclaimed, in surprise. "Where's the ones he had on?"

"There are some old rags in the shop that he had on; but they won't do now, with such feet as he's got."

"What's the matter with his feet, I'd like to know," inquired Mrs. Sharp.