which troubles me with such a sense of pain and simple pathos.

* * * * *

About thirty years ago, a family named Carrol, or Carryl, emigrated
from the North of Ireland, and settled in Coldwater, a little
fishing-village of Michigan.

They were sober and hard-working, but dull and ignorant, and in no way
different from others of their class, except in their unusual strong
affection for each other. Old Carrol, however, a rheumatic old man of
sixty, with this weak, jealous pride in his "b'ys," working late and
early to keep them clothed, to pay his wife's doctor's-bills, and trying
to lay up enough to buy the two girls a feather-bed and a clock when
they were married, stood in no need of whiskey or dances to keep him
alive; this and his wife's ill health separated them from the fighting,
rollicking Irish crew of the hamlet,--set them apart, so to speak, to
act upon each other. Carrol, with one of his sons, worked in a saw-mill,
and the other boys, as they grew old enough, easily found jobbing, being
known as honest, plodding fellows. The little drama of their lives bade
fair to be quiet, and the characters wrought out of it commonplace
enough, had not Death thrust his grim face into the scene.

The youngest child was a girl, Ellen, born long after the others, and,
like most children coming in the advanced age of their parents, was
peculiar: the family traits had worn themselves out, new elements came
in. The Irish neighbors, seeing how closely the girl was kept in-doors,
and the anxious guard held over her by her father and brothers, thought
her a "natural" or "innocent," whether she was or not. The Carrols kept
their own counsel, and warded off gossip as best they could. It was from
Ellen I heard how the change came among them first. "It was a fever,"
she said. "John took it, and little Phil, and then Jane. Jane was the
oldest of us; it was she as nursed mother and kept the house. She looked
as old as mother. Evenings she'd put on a white apron, and take me on
her knee and sing for us. But she took the fever, and they're all three
gone away"; which was always Ellen's phrase for death. She stopped
there, adding afterwards quietly, that it was about that time the
trouble in her head first came. Ellen took her sister's place in
"keeping the house"; she had enough mind to learn the daily routine of
cleaning and the little cooking. Her mother was a cripple for life,
confined to her bed most