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Her mother had died of consumption when Pinkey was eleven, and two years later her father had married his housekeeper. She proved to be a shiftless slattern, never dressed, never tidy, and selfish to the core under the cloak of a good-natured smile. She was always resting from the fatigue of imaginary labours, and her house was a pigsty.
At the end of the garden was a peaked-roof pigsty; it was cleanly kept, and its inhabitant had his meals served with the regularity which characterized all that Grandfather Warren did. Beautiful pigeons lived in the roof, and were on friendly terms with the occupant on the lower floor. The house was not unpicturesque. It was built on a corner, facing two streets.
Half a dozen young masons undertook to pull the wall down and rebuild it twice as strong as before; and the landlord of Ugnot's, being interviewed, declared that he had been exercised in mind for thirty years over the propinquity of the pigsty and the dwelling-house, and would readily accept thirty shillings compensation for all damage likely to be done.
"Last Monday night, four on 'em sickened an' died!" "Most unfortunate!" said I. "An' the rest 'as never been the same since." "Probably ate something that disagreed with them," said I, picking up my hammer and laying it down again. Old Amos smiled and shook his head. "You know James Dutton's pigsty, don't ye, Peter?" "I really can't say that I do."
Thus the prince was appointed imperial swineherd, and as such he lived in a wretchedly small room near the pigsty; there he worked all day long, and when it was night he had made a pretty little pot. There were little bells round the rim, and when the water began to boil in it, the bells began to play the old tune: "A jolly old sow once lived in a sty, Three little piggies had she," &c.
Not very long after the occurrence I have just related, the wife of an Irish emigrant saw a large bear walking very deliberately towards the shanty, which no doubt he mistook for a pigsty, and the inmates for pigs, for they were quite as dirty, therefore it was no great mistake, after all.
I was just moving some of the sticks when something caused me to remember the lateness of the hour. From a pigsty a few yards away came expectant squeals. The occupants doubtless imagined that I was arriving with their breakfast. As I was getting ready to crawl into the sticks, I caught sight of a little patch of washing close by, lying spread on the grass at the corner of a small green lawn.
Hill and valley, tree and fence, woodshed and well-sweep, barn and pigsty, fishing-smacks frozen tip at the wharf, ribbed monsters of dismantled hulks scattered along the river-side, all lie transfigured in the white glory and sunshine. The eye, wherever it turns, aches with the cold brilliance, unrelieved save where.
The lightning, growing stronger, showed my host's best trousers hanging against the whitewashed wall, and from the pigsty came indignant snorts in answer to the deepening moan of the thunder; but the crickets of the house sang after their fashion of the hearth and home, and those outside of the great joy of idleness in the summer fields.
From time to time a rat made its appearance behind the pigsty, and went clattering over the great heap of broken glass that lay there. The pig stood there gobbling down its spoiled potatoes with that despairing noise that put an end to all Pelle's proud dreams of the future, while it filled him with longing oh, such a mad longing!
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