said Mrs. McCarty, begging them to sit down, and excuse the disordered state of her few rags.  She had a hard struggle to live, God knows.  They took off their hats, and sat a few minutes in solemn silence.  The rags moved at the gentleman’s side, which made him move towards the door.  ‘What is there, my good woman?’ he inquired.  ‘She’s a blessed child, Mr. Fitzgerald knows that same:’  says Mrs. McCarty, turning down the rags and revealing the wasted features of her youngest girl, a child eleven years old, sinking in death.  ’God knows she’ll be better in heaven, and herself won’t be long out of it,’ Mrs. McCarty twice repeated, maintaining a singular indifference to the hand of death, already upon the child.  The gentleman left some money to buy candles for poor English, and with Mr. Fitzgerald took himself away.

“Near midnight, the tall black figure of solemn-faced Father Flaherty stalked in.  He was not pleased with the McCartys, but went to the side of the dying child, fondled her little wasted hand in his own, and whispered a prayer for her soul.  Never shall I forget how innocently she looked in his face while he parted the little ringlets that curled over her brow, and told her she would soon have a better home in a better world.  Then he turned to poor English, and the cross, and the candles, and the pictures, and the living faces that gave such a ghastliness to the picture.  Mrs. McCarty brought him a basin of water, over which he muttered, and made it holy.  Then he again muttered some unintelligible sentences, and sprinkled the water over the dying child, over the body of poor English, and over the living-warning Mrs. McCarty and her daughters, as he pointed to the coffin.  Then he knelt down, and they all knelt down, and he prayed for the soul of poor English, and left.  What holy water then was left, Mrs. McCarty placed near the door, to keep the ghosts out.

“The neighbors at the Blazers took a look in, and a few friends at the house of the ‘Nine Nations’ took a look in, and ‘Fighting Mary,’ of Murderer’s Alley, took a look in, and before Father Flaherty had got well out of ‘Cow Bay,’ it got to be thought a trifle of a wake would console Mrs. McCarty’s distracted feelings.  ‘Hard-fisted Sall’ came to take a last look at poor English; and she said she would spend her last shilling over poor English, and having one, it would get a drop, and a drop dropped into the right place would do Mrs. McCarty a deal of good.

“And Mrs. McCarty agreed that it wouldn’t be amiss, and putting with Sall’s shilling the money that was to get the candles, I was sent to the ‘Bottomless Pit’ at the house of the ‘Nine Nations,’ where Mr. Crown had a score with the old woman, and fetched away a quart of his gin, which they said was getting the whole of them.  The McCartys took a drop, and the girls took a drop, and the neighbors took a drop, and they all kept taking drops, and the drops got the better of them all.  One of the