A Scene in London

Image::1 BOTH of them deaf and close on eighty years old --
    She stone-blind, and he nearly so--
    Side by side crouching over the fire in a little London hovel--seven
shillings a week--
    Their joints knotted with rheumatism--their faces all day long mute
like statues of all passing expression--(no cloud flying by, no gleam of
sunshine there)--lips closed and silent :

   But for that now and then taking his pipe out of his mouth,
     He puts his face close to her ear and yells just a word into it,
     And she nods her blind head and gives a raucous screech in answer.

Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism
Vol. 1 -- No. 3,
DECEMBER, 1886
Source: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/journals/freedom/freedom1_3.html