id a fourth. "The male is
bad for them intirely. Saving yer honer's presence, their bellies is
gone away most to nothing."

"And there's six of us in family, yer honer," said Pat. "Six mouths
to feed; and what's eight pennorth of yally male among such a lot as
that; let alone the Sundays, when there's nothing?"

"An' shure, Mr. Herbert," said another, a small man with a squeaking
voice, whose rags of clothes hardly hung on to his body, "warn't I
here with the other boys the last Friday as iver was? Ax Pat Condon
else, yer honer; and yet when they comed to give out the wages, they
sconced me of--." And so on. There were as many complaints to be made
as there were men, if only he could bring himself to listen to them.

On ordinary occasions Herbert would listen to them, and answer them,
and give them, at any rate, the satisfaction which they derived from
discoursing with him, if he could give them no other satisfaction.
But now, on this day, with his own burden so heavy at his heart, he
could not even do this. He could not think of their sorrows; his
own sorrow seemed to him to be so much the heavier. So he passed on,
running the gauntlet through them as best he might, and shaking them
off from him, as they attempted to cling round his steps. Nothing is
so powerful in making a man selfish as misfortune.

And then he went on to Gortnaclough. He had not chosen his walk
to this place with any fixed object, except this perhaps, that it
enabled him to return home round by Desmond Court. It was one of the
places at which a Relief Committee sat every fortnight, and there was
a soup-kitchen here, which, however, had not been so successful as
the one at Berryhill; and it was the place of residence selected by
Father Barney's coadjutor. But in spite of all this, when Herbert
found himself in the wretched, dirty, straggling, damp street of the
village, he did not know what to do or where to betake himself. That
every eye in Gortnaclough would be upon him was a matter of course.
He could hardly turn round on his heel and retrace his steps through
the village, as he would have to do in going to Desmond Court,
without showing some pretext for his coming there; so he walked into
the little shop which was attached to the soup-kitchen, and there he
found the Rev. Mr. Columb Creagh, giving his orders to the little
girl behind the counter.

Herbert Fitzgerald was customarily very civil to the Roman Catholic
priests around him,--somewh