under circumstances peculiarly dreadful, before him!  He tottered on, however, the earth, as he imagined, reeling under him; the heavens, he thought, streaming with fire, and the earth indistinct and discolored.  Home, the paradise of the absent—­home, the heaven of the affections—­with all its tenderness and blessed sympathies, rushed upon his heart.  His father’s deep but quiet kindness, his mother’s sedulous love; his brothers, all that they had been to him—­these, with their thousand heart-stirring associations, started into life before him again and again.  But he was now ill, and the mother—­Ah! the enduring sense of that mother’s love placed her brightest, and strongest, and tenderest, in the far and distant group which his imagination bodied forth.

“Mother!” he exclaimed—­“Oh, mother, why—­why did I ever lave you?  Mother! the son you loved is dyin’ without a kind word, lonely and neglected, in a strange land!  Oh, my own mother! why did I ever lave you?”

The conflict between his illness and his affections overcame him; he staggered—­he grasped as if for assistance at the vacant air—­he fell, and lay for some time in a state of insensibility.

The season was then that of midsummer, and early meadows were falling before the scythe.  As the boy sank to the earth, a few laborers were eating their scanty dinner of bread and milk so near him, that only a dry low ditch ran between him and them.  They had heard his words indistinctly, and one of them was putting the milk bottle to his lips when, attracted by the voice, he looked in the direction of the speaker, and saw him fall.  They immediately recognized “the poor scholar,” and in a moment were attempting to recover him.

“Why thin, my poor fellow, what’s a shaughran wid you?”

Jemmy started for a moment, looked about him, and asked, “Where am I?”

“Faitha, thin, you’re in Rory Connor’s field, widin a few perches of the high-road.  But what ails you, poor boy?  Is it sick you are?”

“It is,” he replied; “I have got the faver.  I had to lave school; none o’ them would take me home, an’ I doubt I must die in a Christian counthry under the open canopy of heaven.  Oh, for God’s sake, don’t lave me!  Bring me to some hospital, or into the next town, where people may know that I’m sick, an’ maybe some kind Christian will relieve me.”

The moment he mentioned “faver,” the men involuntarily drew back, after having laid him reclining against the green ditch.

“Thin, thundher an’ turf, what’s to be done?” exclaimed one of them, thrusting his spread fingers into his hair.  “Is the poor boy to die widout help among Christyeens like us?”

“But hasn’t he the sickness?” exclaimed another:  “an’ in that case, Pether, what’s to be done?”

“Why, you gommoch, isn’t that what I’m wantin’ to know?  You wor ever and always an ass, Paddy, except before you wor born, an’ thin you wor like Major M’Curragh, worse nor nothin’.  Why the sarra do you be spakin’ about the sickness, the Lord protect us, whin you know I’m so timersome of it?”