acco-box; an' at sich a place, too, an' sich an
hour! An' yet he says that she doesn't like a bone in his skin, which
I b'lieve! I'm fairly in the dark here; however time will make it all
clear, I hope; an' for that we must wait."

He then resumed his employment.

Donnel Dhu, who was a man of much energy and activity, whenever his
purposes required it, instead of turning his steps homewards, directed
them to the house of our kind friend Jerry Sullivan, with whose
daughter, the innocent and unsuspecting Mave, it was his intention to
have another private interview. During the interval that had elapsed
since his last journey to the house of this virtuous and hospitable
family, the gloom that darkened the face of the country had become
awful, and such as wofully bore out to the letter the melancholy truth
of his own predictions. Typhus fever had now set in, and was filling the
land with fearful and unexampled desolation. Famine, in all cases the
source and origin of contagion, had done, and was still doing, its work.
The early potato crop, for so far as it had come in, was a pitiable
failure; the quantity being small, and the quality watery and bad. The
oats, too, and all early grain of that season's growth, were still more
deleterious as food, for it had all fermented and become sour, so that
the use of it, and of the bad potatoes, too, was the most certain means
of propagating the pestilence which was sweeping away the people in such
multitudes. Scarcely any thing presented itself to him as he went along
that had not some melancholy association with death or its emblems. To
all this, however, he paid little or no attention. When a funeral met
him, he merely turned back three steps in the direction it went, as was
usual; but unless he happened to know the family from which death had
selected its victim, he never even took the trouble of inquiring who
it was they bore to the grave--a circumstance which strongly proved
the utter and heartless selfishness of the man's nature. On arriving
at Sullivan's, however, he could not help feeling startled, hard and
without sympathy as was his heart, at the wild and emaciated evidences
of misery and want which a couple of weeks' severe suffering had
impressed upon them. The gentle Mave herself, patient and uncomplaining
as she was, had become thin and cheerless; yet of such a character was
the sadness that rested upon her, that it only added a mournful and
melancholy charm to her beaut