eir arrival, which took place on a night
too black for anything beyond a shadowy counting of heads, and a
perception that the bulk of the new-comers' household stuff had jogged
up on one donkey, and must therefore be small. A portion of Big Anne's
furniture had remained behind her in the cabin, owing to certain arrears
of rent. Her heart was scalded, she said, wid the prices she'd only get
for her early chuckens, and they the weight of the world, if you'd feel
them in your hand; and poor Mad Bell, that 'ud mostly bring home a few
odd shillin's wid her, was away since afore last Christmas, and might
never show her face there agin, the crathur; and the poor Dummy gone,
that was great at the knittin' if she got the chance--a bit of narration
which would look funny enough in anybody's rental. Mrs. Quigley, who
went to the door with the offer of a seed of fire, found it shut, and a
voice inside called, "as onmannerly as you plase," "No, we've got
matches;" whereupon another voice, further in the interior, quavered,
"Thank'ee kindly, ma'am." So she departed little wiser than she had
come. But daylight showed that the party consisted of an old man, and
his son, and his son's wife, and her sister, and three small children,
besides some cochin-china fowl, and a black cat with vividly green eyes.
This much was apparent on the surface. Also that the old man was frail,
bent, shrivelled, and civil spoken, that the son was "a big soft gomeral
of a fellow," that both the women were sandily flaxen-haired, with
broad, flat cheeks and light eyes, and that two of the children
resembled them, while the third--a girl a trifle older--was a
dark-haired, disconsolate-looking little thing, "wid her face," Mrs.
Brian said, "not the width of the palm of your hand, and the eyes of
her sunk in her head." As for the fowl, there could be no doubt that
their "onnathural, long, fluffety legs were fit to make a body's flesh
creep," and the cat looked "as like an ould divil as anythin' you ever
witnessed, sittin' blinkin' atop of the turf-stack."

Other less self-evident facts came out by degrees--more slowly than
might have been expected, as the strangers were generally close and
chary of speech. They came from the north, where their affairs had not
prospered--in fact, they had been "sold up and put out of it," as the
young man divulged one day to Brian Kilfoyle. They were a somewhat
intricately connected family, by the name, predominantly, of Patman. Th