tiful, and most affectionate boy from the ground whereon he lay,
that fair head, with its flaxen locks like silk, fell utterly helpless
now to this side, and now to that!

"Art Maguire," she said, "fly, fly,"--and she gave him one look; but,
great God! what an object presented itself to her at that moment. A man
stood before her absolutely hideous with horror; his face but a minute
ago so healthy and high-colored, now ghastly as that of a corpse, his
hands held up and clenched, his eyes frightful, his lips drawn back,
and his teeth locked with strong and convulsive agony. He uttered not
a word, but stood with his wild and gleaming eyes riveted, as if by the
force of some awful spell, upon his insensible son, his only one, if he
was then even that. All at once he fell down without sense or motion,
as if a bullet had gone through his heart or his brain, and there lay as
insensible as the boy he had loved so well.

All this passed so rapidly that the apprentice, who seemed also to have
been paralyzed, had not presence of mind to do any thing but look from
one person to another with terror and alarm.

"Go," said Margaret, at length, "wake up the girls, and then fly--oh,
fly--for the doctor."

The two servant maids, however, had heard enough in her own wild shriek
to bring them to this woful scene. They entered as she spoke, and, aided
by the apprentice, succeeded with some difficulty in laying their master
on his bed, which was in a back room off the parlor.

"In God's name, what is all this?" asked one of them, on looking at the
insensible bodies of the father and son.

"Help me," Margaret replied, not heeding the question, "help me to lay
the treasure of my heart--my breakin' heart--upon his own little bed
within, he will not long use it--tendherly, Peggy, oh, Peggy dear,
tendherly to the broken flower--broken--broken--broken, never to rise
his fair head again; oh, he is dead," she said, in a calm low voice,
"my heart tells me that he is dead--see how his limbs hang, how lifeless
they hang. My treasure--our treasure--our sweet, lovin', and only little
man--our only son sure--our only son is dead--and where, oh, where, is
the mother's pride out of him now--where is my pride out of him now?"

They laid him gently and tenderly--for even the servants loved him as
if he had been a relation--upon the white counterpane of his own little
crib, where he had slept many a sweet and innocent sleep, and played
many a lightsome