nk into a
reverie. But after a while she looked up and said without apparent
relevance: "Heaven be her bed this night, the cratur. Thady, you
heathen, we'd a right to be sayin' the Rosary before we git too stupid
altogether. The eyes of you are droppin' into your head wid sleep this
minnit."

"And me just after lightin' me pipe," remonstrated Thady.

"Ah thin, hurry up and finish it," said Judy, betraying by this
injunction an invincible ignorance touching a man's sentiments towards
his last screw of tobacco, "or else I'll be off sound. It's the fine
warmth makes me sleepy. Sure wid this on me sorra a breath of could gits
next or nigh me to be keepin' me awake."

"Och thin, wait till it's out," said Thady.

"I will so," said Judy. "Sling another stick on the fire, lad, the way
you won't be perished sittin' there in thim woful ould rags. I've plinty
of prayers I might be sayin' till you're ready."

But in a little while, Thady, lingering over his pipe, became aware,
somewhat to his relief, that she had gone fast asleep, muffled up to the
chin in her cloak, with her head leaning back against the stone wall. He
sat and looked at her for some moments with an expression partly
complacent and partly compunctious. "Bedad now the crathur was bein'
perished alive before I brought that to her," he said to himself. "Very
apt she was to be gettin' her death. 'Twas great luck I had entirely to
pick it up. It's the hard life the likes of her has whatever thrampin'
around. Ay, glory be to God, 'twas the best good turn iver I done her."

Just at the time when Thady the Tinker was making these reflections
while the firelight flickered and the waters fleeted under Rosbride
bridge, some mile or so higher up the stream, where the long mountain
slopes are folded closer and steeper about it, a great turmoil had
arisen in a deep hollow among walls of the bare rock. Down one face of
these, a huge glistering slab, the river had for certain thousands of
years been taking a foamy leap; but to-night it happened that the rains,
beating for many days on the mountains, had eaten away the clay setting
which cemented a ponderous lump of rock into a niche immediately over
the fall, and the mass had now crashed down into the channel on the very
verge, blocking all the waterway. This, however, was a door hard to keep
shut, when every affluent rill and runnel out on the broad mountain
shoulders went darting swift and white, so that every minute swell