nd broken all his bones. They would have cared
for him at Madden's house, but he insisted upon being taken home. His
name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's
and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause, the lad, a bright-eyed,
freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information
that his big brother had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance
that he might be in time to administer "extry munction."

The way of the silent little procession led through back
streets,--where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the
gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the
passers-by,--and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy
lane, before one of a half-dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps
and debris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.

A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some
messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were
whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster
of women of the neighborhood; some of the more elderly of whom,
shriveled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their
eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently
should rise into the _keen_ of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no
moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than
sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an
instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked--one could have sworn
impassively--into his staring eyes. Then, still without a word, she
waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.

Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself a minute later inside a
dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam
from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved
by the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze
upon the open door of the only other apartment, the bedchamber.
Through this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and
standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife
and old Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his
crushed limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these
proceedings, they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured
man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home
to his wife, and the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and