moods she read to him Moore's poems
and went over the later lessons of her school life. Even with but part
of a day in each week together they were very happy. The world was full
of sunshine for them then. There were no clouds, no regrets, no fears.
It was a period--a brief period--that for the rest of their lives they
looked back upon as a time when they really lived. I am not sure, but I
am of the impression that the chief reason she could not be persuaded to
visit the Lough in later life was because she wanted to remember it as
she had seen it in that first year of their married life.

Their first child was two years of age when the famine came--the famine
that swept over Ireland like a plague, leaving in its wake over a
million new-made graves. They had been in their own house for over a
year. It was scantily furnished, but it was _home_. As the ravages of
the famine spread, nearly every family in the town mourned the absence
of some member. Men and women met on the street one day, were gone the
next. Jamie put his bench to one side and sought work at anything he
could get to do. Prices ran up beyond the possibilities of the poor. The
potato crop only failed. The other crops were reaped and the proceeds
sent to England as rent and interest, and the reapers having sent the
last farthing, lay down with their wives and children and died. Of the
million who died four hundred thousand were able-bodied men. The wolf
stood at every door. The carpenter alone was busy. Of course it was the
poor who died--the poor only. In her three years of married life Anna
realized in a measure that the future held little change for her or her
husband, but she saw a ray of hope for the boy in the cradle. When the
foodless days came and the child was not getting food enough to survive,
she gave vent to her feelings of despair. Jamie did not quite understand
when she spoke of the death of hope.

"Spake what's in yer heart plainly, Anna!" he said plaintively.

"Jamie, we must not blame each other for anything, but we must face the
fact--we live at the bottom of the world where every hope has a
headstone--a headstone that only waits for the name."

"Aye, dear, God help us, I know, I know what ye mane."

"Above and beyond us," she continued, "there is a world of nice
things--books, furniture, pictures--a world where people and things can
be kept clean, but it's a world we could never reach. But I had hope"--

She buried her face in her han