s
I don't wish to say one word that 'ud distress you now, avourneen. Any
how, Fardorougha, never despair in God's goodness--never do it; who can
tell what may happen?"

Her husband's grief was thus checked, and a train of serious reflection
laid, which, like some of those self-evident convictions that fastened
on the awakened conscience, the old man could not shake off.

Honor, in her further conversation with him, touching the coming
interview with the unhappy culprit, desired him, above all things, to
set "their noble boy" an example of firmness, and by no means to hold
out to him any expectation of life.

"It would be worse than murdher," she exclaimed, "to do so. No--prepare
him by your advice, Fardorougha, ay, and by your example, to be
firm--and tell him that his mother expects he will die like an innocent
man--noble and brave--and not like a guilty coward, afeard to look up
and meet his God."

Infidels and hypocrites, so long as their career in vice is unchecked
by calamity, will no doubt sneer when we assure them, that Fardorougha,
after leaving his wife that morning once more to visit his son, felt a
sense of relief, or, perhaps we should say, a breaking of faint light
upon his mind, which, slight as it was, afforded him more comfort
and support than he ever hoped to experience. Indeed, it was almost
impossible for any heart to exist within the influence of that piety
which animated his admirable wife, and not catch the holy fire which
there burned with such purity and brightness.

Ireland, however, abounds with such instances of female piety and
fortitude, not, indeed, as they would be made to appear in the
unfeminine violence of political turmoil, in which a truly pious
female would not embroil herself; but in the quiet recesses of domestic
life--in the hard struggles against poverty, and in those cruel
visitations, where the godly mother is forced to see her innocent son
corrupted by the dark influence of political crime, drawn within the
vortex of secret confederacy, and subsequently yielding up his life to
the outraged laws of that country which he assisted to distract. It is
in scenes like these that the unostentatious magnanimity of the pious
Irish wife or mother may be discovered; and it is here where, as the
night and storms of life darken her path, the holy fortitude of her
heart shines with a lustre proportioned to the depth of the gloom around
her.

When Fardorougha reached the town in which