r-beds.

The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done
his work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles
and squares on top of the soil.

"Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?" cried Mr. Bilkins,
wrathfully.

"An' did n't I set 'em out?" expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. "An' ain't they
a settin' there beautiful?"

"But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!"

"Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!"

For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains
of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of
the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.

The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand
at the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence
of working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately
after breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner.
Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he
was observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part
of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.

Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman,
she coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad,
any way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours
and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a
light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the
gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about
the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which
women hide their care.

One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen
stove. O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but
not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was
humming "Kate Kearney" quite merrily. But when her work was done, she
stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She scour