ng in from the mellow afternoon sunshine,
and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The
hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think
of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on
a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his
father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at
that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint,
I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers
and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he
fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what
for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did
not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the
floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She
had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was
after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.
Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself
this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart
bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were
took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was
shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she
had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell
of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more
varied dreams.

And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or
why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and
all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as
it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably
desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the
springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all
there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief,
the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact
would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped
away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy
to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and
disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose
proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of
him that