In the bitter cold they, women and
children, crouched round a scanty fir-wood firing, not enough even to
keep alive their natural heat. One long pitiful sight of thriftless
poverty.
To Hungay was a fearful day. Little to eat could I procure, and the cold
gave me a lusty ox's appetite. To me a bellyful came as a windfall.
At last we sat down by the roadside at one small table, hearing the test
of age, rickety and worm-eaten. We gathered like hogs at their troughs,
with the household hog scratching at our feet. I grew impatient and
querulous over constant culinary disappointment. I longed not for the
heaped-up board of the pampered and luxurious, I wanted food. Indigent
man was I, whose dietetical elegancies had been forgotten, a man with
ravenous desires seeking sustenance, not relishes; the means of life,
not the means of pampering the carcass; I wanted food.
And here I had it. The hungry were to be fed.
It was a foul orgy, a gruesome spectacle, a horrible picture of the
gluttony of famished men. This meal conjured up visions of the "most
unlovely of the functions." We fed on _mien_, that long, greasy, grimy,
slippery, slimy string of boneless white--I see it now! And the
half-done tin of sardines set before me, too, the broken stools in the
thatch-worn shed, the dismantled hearth, the muddy earthen floor, the
haggard, hungry villains--I see them all again.
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