hair over his ears, I could not help saying to myself: "You, too, have
got your _stigmata_, my poor fellow!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Shroud.]

CHAPTER XXX

ALL'S WELL

The soul of Jem Deady was grievously perturbed. That calm and placid
philosopher had lost his equanimity. It showed itself in many ways,--in
violent abstraction at meal-times, and the ghoulish way in which he
swallowed cups of tea, and bolted potatoes wholesale; in strange
muttered soliloquies in which he called himself violent and opprobrious
names; in sacrilegious gestures towards Father Letheby's house. And
once, when Bess, alarmed about his sanity, and hearing dreadful sounds
of conflict from his bedroom, and such expressions as these: "How do you
like that?" "Come on, you ruffian!" "You'll want a beefsteak for your
eye and not for your stomach, you glutton!" when Bess, in fear and
trembling, entered the bedroom, she found her amiable spouse belaboring
an innocent bolster which, propped against the wall, did service
vicariously for some imaginary monster of flesh and blood. To all Bess's
anxious inquiries there was but one answer: "Let me alone, 'uman; I'm
half out o' my mind!" There should be a climax, of course, to all this,
and it came. It was not the odor of the steaks and onions that, wafted
across intervening gardens from Father Letheby's kitchen, precipitated
the crisis; nor the tears of Lizzie, who appeared from time to time, a
weeping Niobe, and whose distress would have touched the heart of a less
susceptible Irishman than Jem Deady; nor yet the taunts of the women of
the village, who stung him with such sarcasms as these: "Yes; Faynians
begor, with their drilling, an' their antics, an' their corporals, an'
their sergeants,--they couldn't hunt a flock of geese. Dere goes de
captain!--look at him an' his airs; and thim Dublin jackeens above in
the priest's house, atin' him out o' house and home, and not a man in
Kilronan able to lay a wet finger on 'em." But, as in all great crises,
it is the simple thing that proves the last straw, so in this. What
steaks and onions, tears and taunts, could not do, was done by an
innocent Havana, whose odors, sprung from a dainty weed, held between
the lips of one of these great representatives of Her Majesty's law, and
wafted to the senses of Jem Deady, as he bent over his cabbages in his
little garden, made him throw down his spade with something that seemed
like, and most unlike, a praye