a loneliness, a desolation,
which, especially at breaking-up times, when all her schoolfellows went
joyfully away each to her happy home, and she was left the solitary and
neglected inhabitant of the deserted mansion, must have pressed upon her
very heart The heaviest tasks of the half year must have been pleasure
and enjoyment compared with the dreariness of those lonesome holidays.

And yet she was almost as lonely when we were all assembled. Childhood
is, for the most part, generous and sympathising; and there were many
amongst us who, interested by her deserted situation, would have been
happy to have been her friends. But Honor was one of those flowers which
will only open in the bright sunshine. Never did marigold under a cloudy
sky shut up her heart more closely than Honor O'Callaghan. In a
word, Honor had really one of the many faults ascribed to her by Mrs.
Sherwood, and her teachers and masters--that fault so natural and so
pardonable in adversity--she was proud.

National and family pride blended with the personal feeling. Young as
she was when she left Ireland, she had caught from the old nurse who had
had the care of her infancy, rude legends of the ancient greatness of
her country, and of the regal grandeur of the O'Connors, her maternal
ancestors; and over such dim traces of Cathleen's legends as floated
in her memory, fragments wild, shadowy, and indistinct, as the
recollections of a dream, did the poor Irish girl love to brood. Visions
of long-past splendour possessed her wholly, and the half-unconscious
reveries in which she had the habit of indulging, gave a tinge of
romance and enthusiasm to her character, as peculiar as her story.

Everything connected with her country had for her an indescribable
charm. It was wonderful how, with the apparently scanty means of
acquiring knowledge which the common school histories afforded,
together with here and there a stray book borrowed for her by her young
companions from their home libraries, and questions answered from the
same source, she had contrived to collect her abundant and accurate
information, as to its early annals and present position. Her
antiquarian lore was perhaps a little tinged, as such antiquarianism is
apt to be, by the colouring of a warm imagination; but still it was a
remarkable exemplification of the power of an ardent mind to ascertain
and combine facts upon a favourite subject under apparently insuperable
difficulties. Unless in pur