The Battle of Life by Charlotte Maria Tucker

ON a bright sunny morning in the beginning of April, Silas Mytton harnessed his donkey to the cart, and led it to the shed, where he and his two younger sons loaded the cart with the bundles of wood on the sale of which their livelihood depended. The air was mild; Amy's chair was dragged by May to the doorway, where the sunbeams came streaming in; and there the little invalid sat watching her father and her brothers, Joe, the elder of the two boys, standing in the cart to receive the bundles that were tossed up to him, and pile the firewood in something like order. It was always with goodwill that the boys helped to load the wood-cart, for on the days when it went to the town, the noise of chopping was silenced, and the axe and knife might lie still on the block in the shed.

"Hard work they've cost us, and little enough they'll bring us! " muttered Mytton, as the last bundle was put on the top of the rest. He gave a blow with his stick to the patient donkey to make it move on, and slowly the wood-cart creaked along the rough road across the common, Silas Mytton walking beside it.