nded him to the end, and cheered his last hours by
singing his own songs to him. Then she raised a headstone recounting his
virtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining from any reference to
those peculiarities which had caused him to be such a surprise.

Only one actual chagrin had ever nibbled at the sound heart of Nora
Finnegan--a cruel chagrin, with long, white teeth, such as rodents have!
She had never held a child to her breast, nor laughed in its eyes; never
bathed the pink form of a little son or daughter; never felt a tugging
of tiny hands at her voluminous calico skirts! Nora had burnt many
candles before the statue of the blessed Virgin without remedying this
deplorable condition. She had sent up unavailing prayers--she had, at
times, wept hot tears of longing and loneliness. Sometimes in her sleep
she dreamed that a wee form, warm and exquisitely soft, was pressed
against her firm body, and that a hand with tiniest pink nails crept
within her bosom. But as she reached out to snatch this delicious little
creature closer, she woke to realize a barren woman's grief, and turned
herself in anguish on her lonely pillow.

So when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had faithfully
followed him from his home, and when she learned the details of his
story, she took him in, curs and all, and, having bathed the three of
them, made them part and parcel of her home. This was after the demise
of the second husband, and at a time when Nora felt that she had done
all a woman could be expected to do for Hymen.

Tig was a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora had
always been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter--laughter which
had difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of the
really comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed and
freckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good and
sufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave where
echo lies with her mirth, had that cave not been at such an immeasurable
distance from the crowded neighborhood where she lived.

At the age of four Tig went to free kindergarten; at the age of six he
was in school, and made three grades the first year and two the next. At
fifteen he was graduated from the high school and went to work as
errand boy in a newspaper office, with the fixed determination to make a
journalist of himself.

Nora was a trifle worried about his morals wh