"With great toil and weariness they scrape together enough for each
day, _going by mountain and wilderness seeking their food_; so faint
and enfeebled are they that their bowels cleave to their ribs, and
all their body reechoes with hollowness, and they walk as people
affrighted, the face and body in likeness of death. If they be
merchants, they now sell only cakes of salt and broken

{p. 230}

pepper; the people that have something despise their wares, so that
they go out to sell from door to door, and from house to house; and
when they sell nothing they sit down sadly by some fence or wall, or
in some corner, licking their lips and gnawing the nails of their
hands for the hunger that is in them; they look on the one side and
on the other at the mouths of those that pass by, hoping peradventure
that one may speak some word to them.

"O compassionate God, the bed on which they lie down is not a thing
to rest upon, but to endure torment in; they draw a rag over them at
night, and so sleep; there they throw down their bodies, and the
bodies of children that thou hast given them. For the misery that
they grow up in, for the filth of their food, for the lack of
covering, their faces are yellow, and all their bodies of the color
of earth. They _tremble with cold_, and for leaness they stagger in
walking. They go weeping and sighing, and full of sadness, and all
misfortunes are joined to them; _though they stay by afire, they find
little heat_."[1]

The prayer continues in the same strain, supplicating God to give the