following her old friend.

"I've a great mind to walk back with the umbrilla; he may need it, an'
't ain't a great ways," she said to me, and then looked up quickly,
blushing like a girl. I wished she would, for my part, but it did not
seem best for a stranger to give advice in such serious business.
"I'll tell you what I will do," she told me innocently, a moment
afterwards. "I'll take the umbrilla along with me, and leave word with
Asa Briggs I've got it. I go right by his house, so you needn't charge
your mind nothin' about it."

By the time she had taken off her gold-bowed spectacles and put them
carefully away and was ready to make another start, she had learned
where I came from and where I was going and what my name was, all this
being but poor return for what I had gleaned of the history of herself
and Mr. Teaby. I watched Sister Pinkham until she disappeared,
umbrella in hand, over the crest of a hill far along the road to the
eastward.

THE LUCK OF THE BOGANS.

I.

The old beggar women of Bantry streets had seldom showered their
blessings upon a departing group of emigrants with such hearty good
will as they did upon Mike Bogan and his little household one May
morning.

Peggy Muldoon, she of the game leg and green-patched eye and limber
tongue, steadied herself well back against the battered wall at the
street corner and gave her whole energy to a torrent of speech unusual
to even her noble powers. She would not let Mike Bogan go to America
unsaluted and unblessed; she meant to do full honor to this second
cousin, once removed, on the mother's side.

"Yirra, Mike Bogan, is it yerself thin, goyn away beyant the says?"
she began with true dramatic fervor. "Let poor owld Peg take her last
look on your laughing face me darlin'. She'll be under the ground this
time next year, God give her grace, and you far away lavin' to strange
spades the worruk of hapin' the sods of her grave. Give me one last
look at me darlin' lad wid his swate Biddy an' the shild. Oh that I
live to see this day!"

Peg's companions, old Marget Dunn and Biddy O'Hern and no-legged Tom
Whinn, the fragment of a once active sailor who propelled himself by a
low truckle cart and two short sticks; these interesting members of
society heard the shrill note of their leader's eloquence and suddenly
appeared like beetles out of unsuspected crevices near by. The side
car, upon which Mike Bogan and his wife and child were riding from