e have described;
sometimes wandering, in a solitary manner, through the country at large;
and but seldom appearing at home. On the present occasion, he looked at
Mave, and said:

"I hate sick people, Mave, an' I won't go home; but, whisper, when you
see Peggy Murtagh's father, tell him that I'll have her in a coach, yet,
plaise God, an' he'll take the curse off o' me, when he hears it, maybe,
an' all will be right."

He then bid her good-bye, turned from the road, and bent his steps in
the direction of the Rabbit Bank, on one of the beeches of which he had
intended to hang the miser.

CHAPTER XXIV. -- Rivalry.

If the truth were known, the triumph which Mave Sullivan achieved over
the terror of fever which she felt in common with almost every one in
the country around her, was the result of such high-minded devotion,
as would have won her a statue in the times of old Greece, when
self-sacrifice for human good was appreciated and rewarded. In her case,
indeed, the triumph was one of almost unparalleled heroism; for among
all the difficulties which she had to overcome, by far the greatest was
her own constitutional dread of contagion. It was only on reaching the
miserable pest-house in which the Daltons lived, and on witnessing, with
her own eyes, the clammy atmosphere which, in the shape of dark heavy
smoke, was oozing in all directions from its roof, that she became
conscious of the almost fatal step that she was about to take, and the
terrible test of Christian duty and exalted affection, to which she was
in the act of subjecting herself.

On arriving at the door, and when about to enter, even the resolution
she had come to, and the lofty principle of trust in God, on which
it rested, were scarcely able to support her against the host of
constitutional terrors, which, for a moment, rushed upon her breast. The
great act of self-sacrifice, as it may almost be termed, which she was
about to perform, became so diminished in her imagination, that all
sense of its virtue passed away; and instead of gaining strength from
a consciousness of the pure and unselfish motive by which she was
actuated, she began to contemplate her conduct as the result of a rash
and unjustifiable presumption on the providence of God, and a wanton
exposure of the life he had given her. She felt herself tremble; her
heart palpitated, and for a minute or two her whole soul became filled
with a tumultuous and indistinct! perception of all s