“No, Dora, I never will, dear; she ought to have heard me as you said face to face; instead o’ that she condemned me without a hearin’.  An’ yet, Dora,” he added, “little she knows—­little she drames, what I’m sufferin on her account, and how I love her—­more now than ever, I think; she’s so changed, they say, that you could scarcely know her.”  As he spoke, a single tear fell upon Dora’s hand which he held in his.

“Come.  Bryan,” she said, assuming a cheerfulness which she did not feel, “don’t have it to say that little Dora, who ought and does look up to you for support, must begin to support you herself; to-morrow’s the last day—­who knows but she may relent yet?” Bryan smiled faintly, then patted her head, and said, “darling little Dora, the wealth of nations couldn’t purchase you.”

“Not to do any thing mane or wrong, at any rate,” she replied; after which she went in to attend to the affairs of the family, for this conversation took place in the garden.

As evening approached, a deep gloom, the consequence of strong inward suffering, overspread the features and bearing of Thomas M’Mahon.  For some time past, he had almost given himself over to the influence of what he experienced—­a fact that was observable in many ways, all more or less tending to revive the affection which he felt for his departed wife.  For instance, ever since their minds had been made up to emigrate, he had watched, and tended, and fed Bracky, her favorite cow, with his own hands; nor would he suffer any one else in the family to go near her, with the exception of Dora, by whom she had been milked ever since her mother’s death, and to whom the poor animal had now transferred her affection.  He also cleaned and oiled her spinning-wheel, examined her clothes, and kept himself perpetually engaged in looking at every object that was calculated to bring her once more before his imagination.

About a couple of hours before sunset, without saying where he was going, he sauntered down to the graveyard of Gamdhu where she lay, and having first uncovered his head and offered up a prayer for the repose of her soul, he wept bitterly.

“Bridget,” said he, in that strong figurative language so frequently used by the Irish, when under the influence of deep, emotion; “Bridget, wife of my heart, you are removed from the thrials and throubles of this world—­from the thrials and throubles that have come upon us.  I’m come, now—­your own husband—­him that loved you beyant everything on this earth, to tell you why the last wish o’ my heart, which was to sleep where I ought to sleep, by your side, can’t be granted to me, and to explain to you why it is, in case you’d miss me from my place beside you.  This unfortunate counthry, Bridget, has changed, an’ is changin’ fast for the worse.  The landlord hasn’t proved himself to be towards us what he ought to be, and what we expected he would; an’ so, rather than remain at the terms he axes from us, it’s