It's awful.

But then," continued Abby Atkins, comfortingly, "your father has got money saved in the bank, and he owns his house, so you can get along if he don't have work.

My father 'ain't got any, and he's got the old-fashioned consumption, and he coughs, and it takes money for his medicine.

Then mother's sick a good deal too, and has to have medicine.

We have to have more medicine than most anything else, and we hardly ever have any pie or cake, and it's all the fault of them rich folks." Abby Atkins wound up with a tragic climax and a fierce roll of her black eyes.
That evening Ellen went in to see her grandmother, and was presented with some cookies, which she did not eat.
"Why don't you eat them ?" Mrs.Zelotes asked.
"Can I have them to do just what I want to with ?" asked Ellen.
"What on earth do you want to do with a cooky except eat it ?" Ellen blushed; she had a shamed-faced feeling before a contemplated generosity.
"What do you want to do with them except eat them ?" her grandmother asked, severely.
"Abby Atkins don't have any cookies 'cause her father's out of work," said Ellen, abashedly.
"Did that Atkins girl ask you to bring her cookies ?" "No, ma'am." "You can do jest what you are a mind to with 'em," Mrs.Zelotes said, abruptly.
Ellen never knew why her grandmother insisted upon her drinking a little glass of very nice and very spicy cordial before she went home, but the truth was, that Mrs.Zelotes thought the child so angelic in this disposition to give up the cookies which she loved to her little friend that she was straightway alarmed and thought her too good to live.
The next day she told Fanny, and said to her, with her old face stern with anxiety, that the child was lookin' real pindlin', and Ellen had to take bitters for a month afterwards because she gave the cookies to Abby Atkins..