sorrow which we have at the sufferings of a little child, who seems to look in scared wonder at us, as if to ask, What is this? and Why do you not help?  When a child suffers, we feel a sense of injustice done.  Bridget’s lips were dry.  Her skin was so hot, her whole frame so restless!  And the silent misery of her eyes ate into my very heart.  I smoothed her pillow and bathed her head, and would fain have comforted her, as if she had been my own little sister.  But I could plainly see that my help was not welcome.  When, however, I had done all that I could for her, I quietly told her that she was sick, and that I wanted to have her get well,—­that I saw something was troubling her, and she must tell me what it was.  I don’t think the silent, enduring thing would have spoken even then, if she had not seen that I was crying.  Her own tears came, too; and she briefly said,—­

“You all think I’m a thief.”

I assured her most earnestly to the contrary.

She turned her restless head over towards me again, and her great eyes, all glittering with fever and pain, searched solemnly into mine; and she replied,—­

“You all think I’m a thief.  Yis, I saw you had locked up the money and the silver.  I saw you count the clane clothes that was washed in the house.  Wouldn’t I be after seein’ it?  And they says so in the town.”

It went to my heart to have done those things.  All that I could say was utterly in vain.  She evidently felt nothing of it to be true.  She had received a deep and cruel hurt; and the poor, wild, half-civilized, shy, silent soul had not wherewith to reason on it.  She only endured, and held her peace, and let the fire burn; and her sensitive nerves had allowed pain of mind to become severe physical disease.  My words she scarcely heard; my tears were to her only sympathy.  She knew what she had seen.  Besides, her disease increased upon her.  Almost from minute to minute she grew more restless, and her increasing inattention to what I said frightened as well as hurt me.  The medicines of Dr. Nash were useless.  Before noon I sent for Dr. Bagford, who said it was decidedly brain-fever,—­that she must be leeched, and have ice at her head, and so forth.

Ah, it was useless.  She grew worse and worse; passed through one or two long terrible days of frantic misery, crying and protesting against false accusations with a lamenting voice that made us all cry, too; then lay long in a stupid state, until the doctor said that now it would be better for her to die, because, after such an attack, a brain so sensitive would be disorganized,—­she would be an idiot.

Her poor mother came and helped us wait on her.  But neither care nor medicine availed.  Bridget died; and the funeral was from our house.  I was surprised by the lofty demeanor of Father MacMullen, the Irish priest, the first I had ever met:  a tall, gaunt, bony, black-haired, hollow-eyed man, of inscrutable and guarded demeanor, who received with absolute haughtiness the courtesies of my husband and the reverences of his own flock.  A few of his expressions might indicate a consciousness that we had endeavored to deal kindly with poor little Bridget.  But he did not think so; or at least we know that he has so handled the matter that we meet ill feeling on account of it.