Amy was a year old. She had been a plump, rosy infant when Peter Grimes brought her to the farm. She had two or three pretty frocks and a rattle with an ivory ring. Now her little body was puny and wasted. Her mother would not have recognized the emaciated frame and drawn, pinched features as that of her own offspring. An unnatural intelligence gleamed from the baby's large, pathetic eyes, so mutely eloquent of the tortured, imprisoned soul. All Mollie's maternal instincts were roused by the suffering of this helpless child. She would not trust the little creature out of her sight. "There's no telling what Old Grimes mought do," she confided to one of the older children. "He's gone ter town to-day fer ter git the mail. Ef any money comes from Amy's Maw, mebbe he'll let Amy live. Ef he doan git none he'll say she's a-goin' ter die anyhow an' the sooner she's outten the way the more work he'll git outten me. So I'm goin' ter keep her by me. When God starts cycoring I want Amy cycored 'fore any of the rest of us, 'cause she's the miserablest." So little Amy was carried tenderly to and from the vegetable patch where the children worked daily while she alternately slept and moaned in her grassy bed under the lowering trees. Now, however, there was little time for Mollie's tender ministrations. The vegetable patch demanded her supervision. If Peter Grimes found any fault with the work done by the children they would all be made to suffer. It had been a terrible task to get the kite made and released without discovery by either Grimes, his shiftless wife or their cruel, sneaking, pig-faced son. Of the three merciless monsters Mollie dreaded the latter the most. One never knew at what moment Ambrose, otherwise "Fat", might come sneaking upon them or what form of cruelty his abnormal mind might devise for their further torment. Maria Grimes possessed neither the energy nor the intelligence for independent action. She never took the initiative. She merely carried out the commands of her husband and the demands of her ugly, over-grown son. Of those two she stood in as great awe and fear as did the children. Left undisturbed in her slatternly kitchen with her snuff dip and a bottle of corn liquor she became a negligible figure, slow to think and loath to act. Peter Grimes, himself, sole owner and proprietor as well as instigator of the shameless institution known as Grimes' Hog Farm but which really trafficked in human flesh, was as twisted physically as he was mentally into a repellant, reptilian monster, totally devoid of all human qualities of decency and compassion.