“Kathleen, avourneen!” claimed the poor man, as he looked up despairingly to heaven; “and ye, poor darlins of my heart! is this the news I’m to have for yez whin I go home?—­As you hope for mercy, sir, don’t turn away your ear from my petition, that I’d humbly make to yourself.  Cowld, and hunger, and hardship, are at home before me, yer honor.  If you’d be plased to look at these resates, you’d see that I always paid my rint; and ’twas sickness and the hard times—­”

“And your own honesty, industry, and good conduct,” said the Agent, giving a dark and malignant sneer at him.  “Carthy, it shall be my business to see that you do not spread a bad spirit through the tenantry much longer.—­Sir, you have heard the fellow’s admission.  It is an implied threat he will give us much serious trouble.  There is not such another incendiary on your property—­not one, upon my honor.”

“Sir,” said a servant, “dinner is on the table.”

“Sinclair,” said his landlord, “give him another crown, and tell him to trouble me no more.”  Saying; which, he and the Agent went up to the drawing-room, and, in a moment, Owen saw a large party sweep down stairs, full of glee and vivacity, by whom both himself and his distresses were as completely forgotten as if they had never existed.

He now slowly departed, and knew not whether the house-steward had given him money or not until he felt it in his hand.  A cold, sorrowful weight lay upon his heart; the din of the town deadened his affliction into a stupor; but an overwhelming sense of his disappointment, and a conviction of the Agent’s diabolical falsehood, entered like barbed arrows into his heart.

On leaving the steps, he looked up to heaven in the distraction of his agonizing thoughts; the clouds were black and lowering—­the wind stormy—­and, as it carried them on its dark wing along the sky, he wished, if it were the will of God, that his head lay in the quiet grave-yard where the ashes of his forefathers reposed in peace.  But he again remembered his Kathleen and their children; and the large tears of anguish, deep and bitter, rolled slowly down his cheeks.

We will not trace him into an hospital, whither the wound on his head occasioned him to be sent, but simply state, that, on the second week after this, a man, with his head bound in a handkerchief, lame, bent, and evidently laboring under a severe illness or great affliction, might be seen toiling slowly up the little hill that commanded a view of Tubber Derg.  On reaching the top he sat down to rest for a few minutes, but his eye was eagerly turned to the house which contained all that was dear to him on this earth.  The sun was setting, and shone, with half his disk visible, in that dim and cheerless splendor which produces almost in every temperament a feeling of melancholy.  His house which, in happier days, formed so beautiful and conspicuous an object in the view, was now, from the darkness of its walls, scarcely discernible.