The Vivisector [antikvár]

It was Sunday, and Mumma had gone next door with Lena and the little ones. Under the pepper tree in the yard Pa was sorting, counting, the empty bottles he would sell back: the bottles going clink clink as Pa stuck them on the stack. The fowls were fluffing in the dust and sun: that crook-neck white pullet Mumma said she would hit on the head if only she had the courage to; but she hadn't. (It was Mumma who killed the fowls when any of them got so old you could only eat them.) So the white crook-neck thing, white too about the wattles, stood around grabbing what and whenever it could, but sort of sideways. 'Why're the others pecking at it. Pa?' 'Because they don't like the look of it. Because it's different.' Oh the long heavy Sunday with Pa's old empty bottles. There was an old stove beside the wash-house he had bought, he said, as a speculation. The rust came off in flakes, which you tasted to see, because there was nothing else to do. 'How long you gunner be. Pa, before we have a look at the box?' Pa didn't answer. He was too taken up with his business of the empty bottles. It was Mumma, anyway, who did the talking. Pa was a quiet man. So you could only wait, and kick the rusty old hulking stove, and wait for Pa to take down the box which he almost always did of a Sunday if Mumma and the others weren't there. When he had done his last sum of empty bottles, and carved the muck out of his pipe, and rammed in a few fresh crumbs of tobacco, and lit up, then, after a draw or two, he was ready to fetch down the box from where he kept it, out of reach, amongst the tins of soft soap, the bottles of liniment and turps and the needles he mended the hamess with.