“Let these things be taken away, Bridget,” said the Bodagh; “my appetite is gone, too; that last news is the worst of all.  May the Lord of heaven keep our child’s mind right! for, oh, Bridget, wouldn’t death itself be far afore that?”

“I’m going up to her,” replied his wife; “and may God guard her, and spare her safe and sound to us; for what—­what kind of a house would it be if she——­but I can’t think of it.  Oh, wurrah, wurrah, this night!”

Until the return of their son, with the doctor, both O’Brien and his wife hung in a state of alarm bordering on agony over the bed of their beloved daughter.  Indeed, the rapidity and vehemence with which incoherence, accompanied by severe illness, set in, were sufficient to excite the greatest alarm, and to justify their darkest apprehensions.  Her skin was hot almost to burning; her temples throbbed terribly, and such were her fits of starting and raving, that they felt as if every minute were an hour, until the physician actually made his appearance.  Long before tins gentleman reached the house, the son had made him fully acquainted with what he looked upon as the immediate cause of her illness; not that the doctor himself had been altogether ignorant of it, for, indeed, there were few persons of any class or condition in the neighborhood to whom that circumstance was unknown.

On examining the diagnostics that presented themselves, he pronounced her complaint to be brain fever of the most formidable class, to wit, that which arises from extraordinary pressure upon the mind, and unusual excitement of the feelings.  It was a relief to her family, however, to know that beyond the temporary mental aberrations, inseparable from the nature of her complaint, there was no evidence whatsoever of insanity.  They felt grateful to God for this, and were consequently enabled to watch her sick-bed with more composure, and to look forward to her ultimate recovery with a hope less morbid and gloomy.  In this state we are now compelled to leave them and her, and to beg the reader will accompany us to another house of sorrow, where the mourning was still more deep, and the spirits that were wounded driven into all the wild and dreary darkness of affliction.

Our readers cannot forget the helpless state of intoxication, in which Fardorougha left his unhappy son on the evening of the calamitous day that saw him doomed to an ignominious death.  His neighbors, as we then said, having procured a car, assisted him home, and would, for his wife’s and son’s sake, have afforded him all the sympathy in their power; he was, however, so completely overcome with the spirits he had drank, and an unconscious latent feeling of the dreadful sentence that had been pronounced upon his son, that he required little else at their hands than to keep him steady on the car.  During the greater part of the journey home, his language was only a continuation of the incoherencies which Connor had, with such a humiliating sense of