Excerpt from Poor Relations: Stories of Dutch Peasant Life Across the Open space in front of this central cottage a rabble of excited men, women, and children now swarmed, eagerly expectant of horrors to come. It was early morning, misty and chilly, a raw November day break. The damp little dwelling stared back at the whispering groups, its two windows tightly shuttered, the door in the middle ostentatiously opaque. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.