The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
Saturday I sauntered along the streets of Killarney, passed the
market, and saw all sorts of poor humanity coming in with their
cattle to sell or to buy. Many rode in two-wheeled carts without
seat or spring, drawn by little donkeys, and nearly all the women
and girls were bareheaded and barefooted. On the bridge I saw some
boys looking down. I looked too and there was a spectacle--a
ragged, bareheaded, barefooted woman tossing a wee baby over her
shoulders and trying to get her apron switched around to hold it
fast on her back. I heard her say to herself, "I'll niver do it,"
so I said, "Boys, one of you run down there and help her." At that
instant she succeeded in getting the baby adjusted, and to my
horror took up a bundle from the grass and disclosed a second baby!
Then _I_ went down. I learned that she had just come from the
poorhouse, where she had spent six weeks, and before going further
had laid her two three-weeks-old boys on the cold, wet grass, while
she washed out their clothes in the stream. The clothing was the
merest rags, all scrambled up in a damp bundle. She had heard her
old mother was ill in Milltown and had "fretted" about her till she
could bear it no longer, so had started to walk ten miles to her. I
hailed a boy with a jaunting-car--told her to wait and I would take
her home--got my luncheon--fed the boy's horse, bought lunch for
boy and woman--and off we went, she sitting on one side of the car
with her two babies, wet bundle, two milk bottles and rubber
appendages, bare feet and flying hair, and I on the other, with the
boy in front.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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