The whole town has gone mad for want of coin, and yet they are trampling one another to spend it.
Before the sun, they stood in a line outside the great glass barn, shivering, hundreds of them, the way we stand at the church door for Candlemas. I thought there was famine. I thought they queued for grain, for the last of the salt-pork, for anything to see them past the dark of the year.
Then the doors opened, and they ran. Grown men running, my lord, women too, over one another, into a warehouse fat with goods no honest winter requires.
There is cloth enough there to clothe every soul in three villages. Boxes to the roof-beam, more than the granary holds after a good harvest, and every one of them still full. No blight touched this place. No plague thinned these shelves. It is all simply there, waiting, and the folk fall upon it as we fell upon the fields the year the flood spared us.
They shout that the price is halved, that they must seize it now or want forever. I know that fear. I have felt it, watching frost take the wheat. But there is no frost here. There is no want here. They have manufactured the hunger themselves, so as to enjoy the feeding.
A man walked out clutching a great black box to his chest like a saved child, weeping near enough with joy.
The good Lord sends us lean years to teach us to be still, and to thank Him for the crust. These people have been given every plenty He could pour, and they have used it only to build a famine out of nothing, so they might feel, for one cold morning, the sweetness of surviving it. God pity them.
They do not know they are already saved.