to be sure--and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did
not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the
more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of
personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or
three o'clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to
the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and
innumerable dogs in the distance.

Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and
other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his
nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door
of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement
not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station
(bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up
one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in
the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass
door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was
passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent
ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank
account. So Margaret's married life wore on, and all went merry as a
funeral knell.

After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcae,
had closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down
on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst
into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she
persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler
sex are apt to be--to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the
first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing,
which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in
the preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back
again. Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when
he was well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the
fish-market--for Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous
labor of catching dinners--he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she
liked the change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was g