Brien was a good, kind fellow,
so Father Maloney said, and you'll never hear me say a word against
that. So Father Maloney got round my mother and my father and me, and
married me to O'Brien, and the first year I had a baby, and the second
year I had another, so on and so on, and there's not a soul in this
world can say but that I did well by the five that were in the house
when I came to it.

'Oh! "house"!---- d'ye think it was one house he kept over our heads?
No, but we moved from one room to another, not paying the rent. Well,
and what sort of a training could the children get? Father Maloney he
talked fine about bringing them up for the Church. Did he come in and
wash them when I was a-bed? Did he put clothes on their backs? No, and
fine and angry he was when I told him that that was what he ought to
have done! Oh! but Father Maloney and I went at it up and down many a
day, for when I was wore out with the anger inside me, I'd go and tell
him what I thought of the marriage he'd made, and in a passion he'd get
at a poor thing like me teaching him duty.

'Not that I ever was more than half sorry for the marriage myself,
because of O'Brien's children, poor things, that he had before I came to
them. Likely young ones they were too, and handsome, what would they
have done if I hadn't been there to put them out of the way when O'Brien
was drunk, and knocking them round, or to put a bit of stuff together to
keep them from nakedness?

'"Well," said Father Maloney to me, "why isn't it to O'Brien that you
speak with your scolding tongue?" Faix! and what good was it to spake to
O'Brien, I'd like to know? Did you ever try to cut water with a knife,
or to hurt a feather-bed by striking at it with your fist? A nice
good-natured man was Terry O'Brien--I'll never say that he wasn't
that,--except when he was drunk, which was most of the time--but he'd no
more backbone to him than a worm. That was the sort of husband Father
Maloney married me to.

'The children kept a-coming till we'd nine of them, that's with the five
I found ready to hand; and the elder ones getting up and needing to be
set out in the world, and what prospect was there for them? What could
I do for them? Me always with an infant in my arms! Yet 'twas me and no
other that gave them the bit and sup they had, for I went out to work;
but how could I save anything to fit decent clothes on them, and it
wasn't much work I could do, what with the babies always coming,