id her
heart was broke only "because she had lost her ould hat, and every
thread of a rag on her had been dhrenched and ruinated with the salt
water. How could she go for to do such a sin as destroy herself, she
urged, and she wid a houseful of little childer waitin' for her at home,
the crathurs?" Her arguments proved convincing, and the charge was
summarily dismissed, not without strictures upon Sergeant Young's
excessive zeal, by which he, recking nothing of Talleyrand's maxim, felt
himself puzzled and aggrieved.

The incident, however, brought some more agreeable consequences to Mrs.
M'Bean, as the J. P.'s ladies, commiserating her half-drowned plight,
sent her that same evening a goodly bundle of cast-off clothes, over
which her eyes grew gleefully bright in her careworn face. At one of the
articles included they widened with almost awe. This was an enormous hat
made of white fluffy felt, with vast contorted brims, and great blue
velvet rosettes and streamers. Its fabric was very stout and
substantial, and withal quite new, for its original owner had speedily
found it so stiff and heavy that to wear it gave her a headache and a
crick in her neck. Mrs. M'Bean, for her part, could not entertain the
idea of carrying anything so sumptuous upon her grizzled head; and when
she tried it on her eldest daughter, it totally extinguished and nearly
smothered the child. So she stowed it away in a corner, where it
remained unseen for several weeks.

But next month, on the afternoon of Easter Day, Mrs. M'Bean had two
visitors over from Ballyhoy: Annie Cassidy, elderly and rather grim,
with her young friend Nelly Walsh.

"Nelly's bound to be havin' bad luck this year of her life," Annie
observed in the course of conversation, "for not a new stitch has she
put on her to-day, and it Easter. That's an unlucky thing, accordin' to
the sayin'."

"Ne'er a bit am I afraid of me luck," averred Nelly, cheerful and
threadbare, not to say ragged. But Mrs. M'Bean was pricked by a sudden
thought up the ladder to the little attic aloft, whence she creaked down
again, bringing with her the great white hat. "There, Nelly," she said,
"just clap that on your head, and then nobody can pass the remark that
you didn't get the wear of somethin' new, any way."

Nelly took the hat, which struck her nearly dumb with admiration, but as
she tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shred of looking-glass on the
wall, her delighted expression waxed so eloq