“But aren’t you afeard of catchin’ this terrible faver, that’s takin’ away so many, if you go among them’?”

“Afeard!” she replied; “no, father, I feel no fear either of that or anything else.  If I die, I lave a world that I never had much happiness in, an’ I know that I’ll never be happy again in it.  What then have I to fear from death?  Any change for me must now be for the betther; at all events it can hardly be for the worse.  No; my happiness is gone.”

“What in Heaven’s name is the matther with you?” asked her father; “an’ what brings the big tears into your eyes that way?”

“Good-bye,” said she; and as she spoke, a melancholy smile—­at once sad and brilliant—­irradiated her features.  “It’s not likely, father, that ever you’ll see me under your roof again.  Forgive me all my follies now, maybe it’s the last time ever you’ll have an opportunity.”

“Tut, you foolish girl; it’s enough to sicken one to hear you spake such stuff!”

She stood and looked at him for a moment, and the light of her smile gradually deepened, or rather faded away, until nothing remained but a face of exquisite beauty, deeply shadowed by anxiety and distress.

The Prophet pursued his way to Dick o’ the Grange’s, whither, indeed, he was bent; Sarah, having looked after him for a moment with a troubled face, proceeded in the direction of old Dalton’s, with the sufferings and pitiable circumstances of whose family she was already but too well acquainted.  Her journey across the country presented her with little else than records of death, suffering, and outrage.  Along the roads the funerals were so frequent, that, in general, they excited no particular notice.  They could, in fact scarcely be termed funerals, inasmuch as they were now nothing more than squalid and meagre-looking knots of those who were immediately related to the deceased, hurrying onward, with reckless speed and disturbed looks to the churchyard, where their melancholy burthen was hastily covered up with scarcely any exhibition of that simple and affecting decorum, or of those sacred and natural sorrows, which in other circumstances throw their tender but solemn light over the last offices of death.  As she went along, new and more startling objects of distress attracted her notice.  In dry and sheltered places she observed little temporary sheds, which, in consequence of the dreadful panic which always accompanies an epidemic in Ireland, had, to a timid imagination, something fearful about them, especially when it is considered that death and contagion were then at work in them in such terrible shapes.  To Sarah, however, they had no terrors; so far from that, a great portion of the day was spent by her in relieving their wretched, and, in many cases, dying inmates, as well as she could.  She brought them water, lit fires for them, fixed up their shed, and even begged aid for them from the neighbors around, and, as far as she could, did everything to ease their