r be), and may you die of a good old age, and in the
true faith, and be waked handsomely, as your own father was last
Friday s'ennight, seeing as how he took it into his head to leave this
world for a better. It was a very dacent funeral-procession, my dear
Terence, and your father must have been delighted to see himself so
well attinded. No man ever made a more handsome corpse, considering
how old, and thin, and haggard he had grown of late; and how grey his
hair had turned. He held the nosegay between his fingers, across his
breast, as natural as life, and reminded us all of the blessed saint
Pope Gregory who was called to glory some hundred years before either
you or I was born.

"Your mother's quite comfortable; and there she sits in the ould
chair, rocking to and fro all day long, and never speaking a word to
nobody, thinking about heaven, I dare to say; which is just what she
ought to do, seeing that she stands a very pretty chance of going
there in the course of a month or so. Divil a word has she ever said
since your father's departure, but then she screamed and yelled enough
to last for seven years at the least. She screamed away all her
senses any how, for she has done nothing since but cough, cough, and
fumble at her pater-nosters,--a very blessed way to pass the remainder
of her days, seeing that I expect her to drop every minute, like an
over ripe sleepy pear. So don't think any more about her, my son, for
without you are back in a jiffy, her body will be laid in consecrated
ground, and her happy, blessed soul in purgatory. _Pax vobiscum_.
Amen! Amen!

"And now having disposed of your father and your mother so much to
your satisfaction, I'll just tell you that Ella's mother died in the
convent at Dieppe, but whether she kept her secret or not I do not
know; but this I do know, that if she didn't relieve her soul by
confession, she's damned to all eternity. Thanks be to God for all
his mercies. Amen! Ella Flanagan is still alive, and, for a nun, is
as well as can be expected. I find that she knows nothing at all
about the matter of the exchanging the genders of the babbies--only
that her mother was on oath to Father O'Toole, who ought to be hanged,
drawn, and quartered, instead of those poor fellows whom the
government called rebels, but who were no more rebels than Father
McGrath himself, who'll uphold the Pretender, as the