"What's that got to do with it?" screamed Mrs. Brackett. "He brought the bad luck with him. Ain't my husband dead, and isn't that skunk--an entire stranger--still livin'?" The voice was masculine, but the logic was feminine. In cases of great prostration with mental debility, in the hopeless vacuity that precedes death by inanition or starvation, it is sometimes very effective. They all assented to it, and, by a singular intellectual harmony, the expression of each was the same. It was simply an awful curse. "What are you goin' to do?" "If I was a man, I'd know!" "Knife him!" "Kill him, and"---- The remainder of this sentence was lost to the others in a confidential whisper between Mrs. Brackett and Dumphy. After this confidence they sat and wagged their heads together, like two unmatched but hideous Chinese idols. "Look at his strength! and he not a workin' man like us," said Dumphy. "Don't tell me he don't get suthin' reg'lar." "Suthin' what?" "Suthin' TO EAT!" But it is impossible to convey, even by capitals, the intense emphasis put upon this verb. It was followed by a horrible pause. "Let's go and see." "And kill him?" suggested the gentle Mrs. Brackett. They all rose with a common interest almost like enthusiasm. But after they had tottered a few steps, they fell. Yet even then there was not enough self-respect left among them to feel any sense of shame or mortification in their baffled design. They stopped--all except Dumphy. "Wot's that dream you was talkin' 'bout jess now?" said Mr. McCormick, sitting down and abandoning the enterprise with the most shameless indifference. "'Bout the dinner at St. Jo?" asked the person addressed--a gentleman whose faculty of alimentary imagination had been at once the bliss and torment of his present social circle. "Yes." They all gathered eagerly around Mr. McCormick; even Mr. Dumphy, who was still moving away, stopped. "Well," said Mr. March, "it began with beefsteak and injins--beefsteak, you know, juicy and cut very thick, and jess squashy with gravy and injins." There was a very perceptible watering of the mouth in the party, and Mr. March, with the genius of a true narrator, under the plausible disguise of having forgotten his story, repeated the last sentence--"jess squashy with gravy and injins. And taters--baked." "You said fried before!--and dripping with fat!" interposed Mrs. Brackett, hastily. "For them as likes fried--but baked goes furder--skins and all--and sassage and coffee and flapjacks!" At this magical word they laughed, not mirthfully perhaps, but eagerly and expectantly, and said, "Go on!" "And flapjacks!" "You said that afore," said Mrs. Brackett, with a burst of passion. "Go on!" with an oath. The giver of this Barmecide feast saw his dangerous position, and looked around for Dumphy, but he had disappeared. CHAPTER II. WITHIN.