Arethusa by F. Marion Crawford

When it was quite dark the old woman came back with something hidden under her tattered shawl, and Zoe drew the rotten shutters that barely hung by the hinges and fastened them inside with bits of rain-bleached cord that were knotted through holes in the wood. She also shut the door and put up a wooden bar across it. While she was doing this she could hear Anastasia, the crazy paralytic who lived farther down the lane, singing a sort of mad litany of hunger to herself in the dark. It was the thin nasal voice of a starving lunatic, rising sharply and then dying away in a tuneless wail: --

Holy Mother, send us a little food, for we are hungry!