tenants who still remained on the properties he had
bought. He turned all his land into pasture, for this was the prosperous
era of the graziers, and cattle were rapidly transformed into gold.
Other landlords pursued similar courses, and within a couple of years,
ten thousand people had been swept from the neighborhood around.

The calamity reached down to the very lowest stratum, and touched depths
so profound as the fortunes of the widow Cunningham and her daughter
Betty.

It had now become habitual for the widow and her daughter to remain for
a couple of days with barely any food. One night they were sitting
opposite each other on the bare floor of the railway arch in which they
had for several years found refuge, staring at each other with the
blank, wild gaze of hunger. There was a terrible pang at the heart of
the mother on this night of nights. Throughout all her long years of
struggle two great thoughts still remained burning in her soul, and in
spite of poverty and hunger that soul still remained afire. One was
vengeance on Cosgrave for the long train of woes through which she
herself had passed, and the other was the protection of her child.

With that profound reverence for female honor which is still one of the
best characteristics of the Irish poor, she had seen the growth of her
beautiful daughter with a love mixed with terror, and guarded her child
as the tigress watches by her lair. Her own life had long since ceased
to be dear to her. She walked for hours through the streets, she pleaded
for custom, she smiled under insult, she bore rain and hail and snow, in
hope of the fulfilment of this great passionate purpose--to keep her
daughter pure.

The misery of the last six months had been aggravated by the dread,
growing in intensity with every hour, that all this endurance would be
in vain, that behind the wolf of hunger there stalked the more cruel
wolf of lust, and that her daughter was doomed. On this subject not a
word passed between the two women, for the delicacy of feeling which
marks even the humblest grade of Irish life sealed their lips; but the
dread was always there in the mother's heart, pursuing her as a
nightmare through the long watches of the darkness, and haunting her
every moment as wearily she carried her basket through the streets in
the day.

"Buy a few apples, yer honor, for God's sake," she often said to a
passer-by, in a tone that might have struck one as menacing, or at least