y a very handsome girl, of a far more than
common amount of intelligence, and with a spirit daringly ambitious. As
the favored friend and companion of his cousin, he took it for granted
that the peculiar customs of Ireland admitted such intimacies between
those socially unequal, and that there was nothing strange or unusual in
seeing her where she was. He therefore paid her every attention he
would have bestowed on the most high-born damsel of his own court; he
exhibited that deference which his own language denominated homage; and,
in fact, long before he had touched her affections, he had flattered
her pride and self-love by a courtesy to which she had never, in all her
intercourse with the world, been habituated.

Perhaps my reader needs not one-half of the explanation to surmise
why two young people--both good-looking, both attractive, and both
idle--should, in the solitude of a country cottage, fall in love
with each other. That they did so, at all events,--she first, and he
afterwards,--is, however, the fact; and now, by the simple-hearted
arrangement of my poor mother,--whose thoughts had never taken in such
a casualty,--were they to set off together as fellow-travellers for
Dublin. So far, indeed, from even suspecting such a possibility, it
was only a few days previously that she had been deploring to Polly her
cousin's fickleness in breaking off his proposed marriage in France, on
the mere ground that his absence must necessarily have weakened the ties
that bound him to his betrothed What secret hopes the revelation may
have suggested to Polly's mind is matter that I cannot even speculate
on.

It was with a heavy heart my poor mother saw them drive from the door,
and came back to sit down in solitude beside the cradle of her baby. It
was a dark and rainy day of winter; the beating of the waves against
the rocky shore, and the wailing winds, made sad chorus together; and
without, as well as within, all was cheerless and depressing. Dark and
gloomy as was the landscape, it was to the full as bright as the scene
within her own heart; for now that she began to arrange facts and
circumstances together, and to draw inferences from them, she saw that
nothing but ruin lay before her. The very expressions of Fagan's letter,
so opposite to the almost submissive courtesy of former times, showed
her that he no longer hesitated to declare her the dependent on his
bounty. "And yet," cried she, aloud, "are these the boasted