as entirely disproportionate to the urgency of the appeal; but in every
such prayer for pence the mother felt that she was crying for her child,
and her child's soul, and her accents came from the very anguish of her
mother's heart.

On this night--it was about a month after the election of Crowe--the two
sat together, buried in their own sad thoughts. They were suddenly
aroused by the floor becoming inundated, and at once knew what to
expect. The Shannon periodically rose above its banks outside Ballybay,
and then its waters overspread the "Big Meadows," and the railway arch
underneath which the widow and her daughter had taken refuge was, as
will be remembered, close to these Meadows.

They rose and rushed from the spot. They were now absolutely homeless,
without even a place on which to lay their heads. They went further on
to another railway arch, and at last slept. When the mother awoke in the
morning she was alone.

At this period a Ballybay landlord, afterwards destined to figure
largely in the social life of Ireland, had just come of age. Thomas
McNaghten was perhaps the handsomest Irishman of his day; tall,
broad-shouldered, muscular. He had a physique as splendid as that of the
race of peasants from whom his father sprang; while from the gentler
race of his mother he derived features of exquisite delicacy and the
complexion of a lily-like pink and white. He afterwards ran a career of
mad dissipation that made his name a by-word even among the reckless and
debauched class to which he belonged, and died a paralytic before he was
forty. But at the period of our story, he was still in the full strength
and the first flush of manhood. He had cast his eyes on Betty
Cunningham, and had held out to her bribes that seemed to unfold to the
girl visions of untold wealth. The innate purity of the maiden had
hitherto been proof against the direct influences of poverty and
wretchedness and the advances of her tempter. But at last the combined
intensities of hunger and despair became his allies.

Three weeks after her desertion of her mother Betty Cunningham was drunk
in one of the public-houses, which were frequented by the soldiers
quartered in Ballybay. The fatal progress of the Irish girl who has
fallen is more rapid than in any other country. Society, always cruel to
its hapless victims and its outcasts, in Ireland is fanatically and
barbarously savage. Betty was driven out from every house! People
shuddered as sh