met with, I spare you the recital of them.

Now Mrs. Sheehy was far less tolerated and tolerable than either of
her peccant sons. She had a little withered face, with hard red
cheeks and bright, rather mad black eyes, set in a frame of crinkly
black hair. You might meet her on the road of a sweet summer morning,
trapesing, to use the expressive Irish word, along, with a sunshade
over her battered bonnet. Her attire was generally made up of very
tarnished finery,--a befrilled skirt trailing in the dust behind her,
and a tattered lace shawl disposed corner-wise over her shoulders. She
seemed always to wear the cast-off garments of fine ladies, and we had
an explanation of this fact. It was supposed that Mrs. Sheehy
represented herself to pious Protestant ladies, for about a radius of
twenty miles, as a Papist, who might easily be brought to see the
error of her ways, and as one who for her liberal tendencies was much
in disfavour with the priests. I know that to her co-religionists she
complained that Protestant charities were closed to her because she
had become a Catholic. There was a legend that Mrs. Sheehy came from a
Protestant stock, but I do not know whether this were true or merely
invented for convenience when the lady went asking alms.

It was from some of these Protestant ladies the suggestion came that
Mick should go to America under some precious emigration scheme. They
are always, with their mistaken philanthropy, drafting away the boys
and girls from Ireland, to cast them, human wreckage, in the streets
of New York; always taking away the young life from the sweet glens
over which the chapel bell sends its shepherding voice, and casting it
away in noisome places, while at home the aged folk go down alone the
path to the grave.

Now we always thought that Mrs. Sheehy must have suggested Mick as an
emigrant, for he was distinctly not eligible. But it was very easy to
puff up poor Mick's mind with pictures of America as a Tom Tiddler's
ground, and the mother did this in private, while in public she wrung
her hands over the wilful boy that would go and leave her lonesome in
her old age. Pretty soon the matter was settled, and Mick went about
as vain as any young recruit when he has taken the Queen's shilling
and donned the scarlet, and has not yet realised that he has been a
fine fat goose for the fox-sergeant's plucking.

But if Mick was full of the spirit of adventure, and looked forward to
that spring W