Shifting Winds

CHAPTER ONE.

THE COTTAGE AND ITS INMATES.

The family board was spread; the family kettle--an unusually fat one--
was singing on the fire, and the family chimney was roaring like a lion
by reason of the wind, which blew a hurricane outside, and shook the
family mansion, a small wooden hut, to its foundations.

The hour was midnight. This fact was indicated by the family clock--a
Dutch one, with a face which had once been white, but was now become
greenish yellow, probably from horror at the profanity of the artist who
had painted a basket of unrecognisable fruit above it, an irate cockatoo
below it, and a blue church with a pink steeple as near to the centre of
it as the hands would admit of.

The family circle, consisting of a stout good-looking woman of thirty or
thereabouts, and a little boy and girl, were of the fisher class,
obviously so to the senses of sight and smell. They sat by the fire.

It was an unusual hour for supper, but then it was an unusually wild
night, and the frequent glance cast by the woman at the Dutch clock with
the horrified countenance, showed clearly that the board was not spread
for the family meal, but that they waited up for some absent one.

I have said that the family circle sat by the fire, but this is not
strictly correct. One member of it, the little boy, stood in the middle
of the room, howling!--howling so violently that his fat face had
changed from its wonted bright red to deep purple. Looking at him--as
he stood there arrayed in his uncle's red night-cap, his own
night-shirt, which was also a day-shirt and much too small, and his
father's pea-jacket, which was preposterously too large--one could not
avoid the alarming surmise that there _might_ be such a thing as
juvenile apoplexy, and that that boy was on the point of becoming a
living, if not a dead, example of the terrible disease.