It is pitiful, if you are the home-keeping mother of an impoverished family, to drop in your traces helpless at night, and awake unstrengthened in the early morning.

The haunting consciousness of rooted poverty is an improper bedfellow for a woman who still bears.

It has been known to induce physical and spiritual malformations in the babies she nurses.
It did require strength to lift the burden of life, in the gray morning, on Dover Street; especially on Saturday morning.

Perhaps my mother's pack was the heaviest to lift.

To the man of the house, poverty is a bulky dragon with gripping talons and a poisonous breath; but he bellows in the open, and it is possible to give him knightly battle, with the full swing of the angry arm that cuts to the enemy's vitals.