even the felon in his cell—­can imagine what he felt in the solitary misery of his feverish bed.  Hard is the heart that cannot feel his sorrows, when, stretched beside the common way, without a human face to look on, he called upon the mother whose brain, had she known his situation, would have been riven—­whose affectionate heart would have been broken, by the knowledge of his affliction.  It was a situation which afterwards appeared to him dark and terrible.  The pencil of the painter could not depict it, nor the pen of the poet describe it, except like a dim vision, which neither the heart nor the imagination are able to give to the world as a tale steeped in the sympathies excited by reality.

His whole heart and soul, as he afterwards acknowledged, were, during his trying illness, at home.  The voices of his parents, of his sisters, and of his brothers, were always in his ears; their countenances surrounded his cold and lonely shed; their hands touched him; their eyes looked upon him in sorrow—­and their tears bedewed him.  Even there, the light of his mother’s love, though she herself was distant, shone upon his sorrowful couch; and he has declared, that in no past moment of affection did his soul ever burn with a sense of its presence so strongly as it did in the heart-dreams of his severest illness.  But God is love, and “temporeth the wind to the shorn lamb.”

Much of all his sufferings would have been alleviated, were it not that his two best friends in the parish, Thady and the curate, had been both prostrated by the fever at the same time with himself.  There was consequently no person of respectability in the neighborhood cognizant of his situation.  He was left to the humbler class of the peasantry, and honorably did they, with all their errors and ignorance, discharge those duties which greater wealth and greater knowledge would, probably, have left unperformed.

On the morning of the last day he ever intended to spend in the shed, at eleven o’clock he hoard the sounds of horses’ feet passing along the road, The circumstance was one quite familiar to him; but these horsemen, whoever they might be, stopped, and immediately after, two respectable looking men, dressed in black, approached him.  His forlorn state and frightfully wasted appearance startled them, and the younger of the two asked, in a tone of voice which went directly to his heart, how it was that they found him in a situation so desolate.

The kind interest implied by the words, and probably a sense of his utterly destitute state, affected him strongly, and he burst into tears.  The strangers looked at each other, then at him; and if looks could express sympathy, theirs expressed it.

“My good boy,” said the first, “how is it that we find you in a situation so deplorable and wretched as this?  Who are you, or why is it that you have not a friendly roof I to shelter you?”

“I’m a poor scholar,” replied Jemmy, “the son of honest but reduced parents:  I came to this part of the country with the intention of preparing myself for Maynooth and, if it might plase God, with the hope of being able to raise them out of their distress.”