opeful work when compared with
Mistress Mary Lyon, searching with her tongue in this mass of
self-sufficiency for any trace of Boyd Connoway's long-lost conscience.

"Why are you not at home?" she cried; "I heard Bridget complaining as I
came by, that she could not feed the pig because she had nobody to bring
her wood for her boiler fire--and she in the middle of her blanket
washing!"

The husband whom fate and her own youthful folly had given to Bridget
Connoway, took off his battered and weather-beaten hat with the native
politeness of a born Irishman. He did not rise. That would have been too
much to expect of him. But he uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the
other way about.

"Mistress Lyon," he said indolently, but with the soft, well-anointed
utterance of the blarneying islander, which does not die away till the
third generation of the poorest exile from Erin, "now, misthress dear,
consider!"

"I have considered you for seven years, and seven to the back of that,
Boyd Connoway, and you are a lazy lout! Every year you get worse!"

My grandmother counted nothing so stimulating as truth spoken to the
face. She acted, with all save her male grandchildren, on the ancient
principle that "Praise to the face is an open disgrace!" And Boyd, in
his time, had been singularly exempt from this kind of disgrace, so far
as my grandmother was concerned.

"But consider, Mrs. Lyon," he went on tranquilly, while my relative
stood in the road and eyed him with bitter scorn, "there's my wife, now
she's up early and late. She's scrubbing and cleaning, and all for
what?--just that yonder pack o' children o' hers should go out on the
road and come trailing back in ten minutes dirtier than ever. She runs
to Shepstone Oglethorpe's to give his maid a help in the mornings, all
for a miserable three shillings a week. She takes no rest to the sole of
her foot, nor gives nobody any either! Poor Bridget--I am sorry for
Bridget. 'Take things easier, and you will feel better, Bridget,' I say.
'Trust in Providence, Bridget!' 'Think on what the Doctor said three
Sundays but one ago from the very pulpit.' And would ye believe me,
Mistress Lyon, that poor woman, being left to herself, threw all the
weights at me one after the other--aye, and would have thrown the scales
too if I had not come away!"

Here Connoway sighed and stretched himself luxuriously, rubbing the
stiff fell of his hair meditatively as he did so.

"Ah, poor Bridget," h