The murmur swelled into a roar for "Bread!
Bread!" My hearers had taken me at my word. I had raised the spirit; could
I command him, now he was abroad?
"Go to Jennings's farm!"
"No! he ain't no corn, he sold un' all last week."
"There's plenty at the Hall farm! Rouse out the old steward!"
And, amid yells and execrations, the whole mass poured down the hill,
sweeping me away with them. I was shocked and terrified at their threats.
I tried again and again to stop and harangue them. I shouted myself hoarse
about the duty of honesty; warned them against pillage and violence;
entreated them to take nothing but the corn which they actually needed;
but my voice was drowned in the uproar. Still I felt myself in a measure
responsible for their conduct; I had helped to excite them, and dare not,
in honour, desert them; and trembling, I went on, prepared to see the
worst; following, as a flag of distress, a mouldy crust, brandished on the
point of a pitchfork.
Bursting through the rotting and half-fallen palings, we entered a wide,
rushy, neglected park, and along an old gravel road, now green with grass,
we opened on a sheet of frozen water, and, on the opposite bank, the huge
square corpse of a hall, the close-shuttered windows of which gave it a
dead and ghastly look, except where here and there a single one showed, as
through a black empty eye-socket, the dark unfurnished rooms within.
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