a's photograph to a hole in the wall where the pig cannot
possibly molest it.

* Saint Mide, the Brigit of Munster.

At the far end of the row lives 'Omadhaun Pat.' He is a 'little
sthrange,' you understand; not because he was born with too small a
share of wit, but because he fell asleep one evening when he was lying
on the grass up by the old fort, and--'well, he was niver the same thing
since.' There are places in Ireland, you must know, where if you lie
down upon the green earth and sink into untimely slumber, you will 'wake
silly'; or, for that matter, although it is doubtless a risk, you may
escape the fate of waking silly, and wake a poet! Carolan fell asleep
upon a faery rath, and it was the faeries who filled his ears with
music, so that he was haunted by the tunes ever afterward; and perhaps
all poets, whether they are conscious of it or not, fall asleep on faery
raths before they write sweet songs.

Little Omadhaun Pat is pale, hollow-eyed, and thin; but that, his mother
says, is 'because he is over-studyin' for his confirmation.' The
great day is many weeks away, but to me it seems likely that, when the
examination comes, Pat will be where he will know more than the priests!

Next door lives old Biddy Tuke. She is too aged to work, and she sits
in her doorway, always a pleasant figure in her short woollen petticoat,
her little shawl, and her neat white cap. She has pitaties for food,
with stirabout of Indian meal once a day (oatmeal is too dear), tea
occasionally when there is sixpence left from the rent, and she has more
than once tasted bacon in her eighty years of life; more than once, she
tells me proudly, for it's she that's had the good sons to help her a
bit now and then,--four to carry her and one to walk after, which is the
Irish notion of an ideal family.

"It's no chuckens I do be havin' now, ma'am," she says, "but it's
a darlin' flock I had ten year ago, whin Dinnis was harvestin' in
Scotland! Sure it was two-and-twinty chuckens I had on the floore wid
meself that year, ma'am."

"Oh, it's a conthrary world, that's a mortial fact!" as Phelim O'Rourke
is wont to say when his cough is bad; and for my life I can frame no
better wish for ould Biddy Tuke and Omadhaun Pat, dark Timsy and the
Bocca, than that they might wake, one of these summer mornings, in the
harvest-field of the seventh heaven. That place is reserved for the
saints, and surely these unfortunates, acquainted with grief