Poor Pat’s devotion to his beloved ruins was the cause of his undoing.  One spring morning, when a late frost had made the grass unusually slippery, just as he was expounding to an interested audience how the Danes used to shoot “arrers through them little slits of windies in the wall beyant,” his foot slipped, and after rolling for a little distance down the steep incline, he went over the precipitous side of the crag, and fell some twenty feet on to the stones below.  Many bones were broken, and as surgical aid was difficult to obtain, and but of poor quality when at last secured, most of them were badly set, and the poor old fellow remained to the end of his days a cripple.  How he and his wife and their last remaining child, a son born to them when Pat was already old, managed thenceforth to eke out a living would have been a marvel to their neighbours, if similar problems of existence had not been so common in the countryside.  There was the pig, of course, and a few chickens, and “herself” did a day’s work now and then in the fields, and escorted the visitors over the ruins, well primed and prompted by Patrick as to the “laygends and tragedies” (traditions) of those sacred precincts; and little Mike minded the sheep, and frightened crows and picked turnips for their landlord, “ould Pether Rorke beyant at Monavoe,” but “Goodness knows,” as the neighbours would say, shaking their heads at each other, “it was not much of a livin’ the poor child ’ud make out of him—­the ould villain!  Didn’t he let his own flesh and blood go cold and hungry—­’twasn’t to be expected he’d do more nor he could help for a stranger.  Aye indeed, he was a great ould villain!  To think of him with lashin’s and lavin’s of everything an’ money untold laid by, an’ his only son’s widdy livin’ down there with a half-witted lodger in a little black hole of a place that was not fit for a pig, let alone a Christian, an’ the beautiful little cratur’, his grandchild, Roseen, runnin’ about barefut, with her dotey little hands an’ feet black an’ blue wid the cowld—­sure what sort of a heart had the man at all?”

Old Pat was sitting alone one summer’s afternoon, “herself” having gone up to Donoughmor with some Quality, and Mike not having yet returned from work, when little Roseen Rorke poked her sunny face in at the door.

“Is that yourself?” said Pat pleasantly.  He was fond of the child, as was every one in the neighbourhood, and being a fellow-sufferer from the hard-heartedness of her grandfather, who was, as has been said, his landlord, was perhaps the most violent of her champions.

Roseen’s blue eyes, peering through her tangled sheaf of golden-brown curls, took a hasty and discontented survey of the small kitchen.

“Isn’t Mike here?” she inquired.

“He’s not, asthore, an’ won’t be home this hour most likely; but come in out o’ the scorching sun, an’ sit down on the little creepy stool.  Herself will be in in a few minutes, an’ maybe she’ll give ye a bit o’ griddle cake.”