“Then when Jack came home in the winter nights, it would do your heart good to see Nancy sitting at her wheel, singing, ‘Stachan Varagah,’ or ‘Peggy Na Laveen,’ beside a purty clear fire, with a small pot of murphys boiling on it for their supper, or laid up in a wooden dish, comfortably covered with a clane praskeen on the well-swept hearth-stone; whilst the quiet, dancing blaze might be seen blinking in the nice earthen plates and dishes that stood over against the side-wall of the house.  Just before the fire you might see Jack’s stool waiting for him to come home; and on the other side, the brown cat washing her face with her paws, or sitting beside the dog that lay asleep, quite happy and continted, purring her song, and now and then looking over at Nancy, with her eyes half-shut, as much as to say, ’Catch a happier pair nor we are, Nancy, if you can.’

“Sitting quietly on the roost above the door, were Dicky the cock, and half-a-dozen hens, that kept this honest pair in eggs and egg-milk for the best part of the year, besides enabling Nancy to sell two or three clutches of March-birds every season, to help to buy wool for Jack’s big-coat, and her own gray-beard gown and striped red and blue petticoat.

“To make a long story short—­No two could be more comfortable, considering every thing.  But, indeed, Jack was always obsarved to have a dacent ginteel turn with him; for he’d scorn to see a bad gown on his mother, or a broken Sunday coat on himself; and instead of drinking his little earning in a shebeen-house, and then eating his praties dry, he’d take care to have something to kitchen* them; so that he was not only snug and dacent of a Sunday, regarding wearables, but so well-fed and rosy, that a point of a rush would take a drop of blood out of his cheek.** Then he was the comeliest and best-looking young man in the parish, could tell lots of droll stories, and sing scores of merry songs that would make you split your sides with downright laughing; and when a wake or a dance would happen to be in the neighborhood, maybe there wouldn’t be many a sly look from the purty girls for pleasant Jack Magennis!

* The straits to which the poor Irish are put for what is termed kitchen—­that is some liquid that enables them to dilute and swallow the dry potato—­are grievous to think of.  An Irishman in his miserable cabin will often feel glad to have salt and water in which to dip it, but that alluded to in the text is absolute comfort.  Egg milk is made as follows:—­A measure of water is put down suited to the number of the family; the poor woman then takes the proper number of eggs, which she beats up, and, when the water is boiling, pours it in, stirring it well for a couple of minutes.  It is then made, and handed round in wooden noggins, every one salting for themselves.  In color it resembles milk, which accounts for its name.

Our readers must have heard of the