etty!"

"Eh! Who's callin' me?" said the hag, with her hand aloft. "I'm here, my
Lord, neither ashamed nor afeard to say my name."

"She's wanderin'," cried another; "she thinks she's in Coort."

"Betty Cobbe! I say. It's me!" said my introducer, once more.

The old woman turned fiercely round, and her dimmed and glassy eyes,
bloodshot from excess and passion, seemed to flare up into an angry
gleam as she said, "You dirty thief! Is it you that's turnin' informer
agin me,--you that I took up--out of yer mother's arms, in Green Street,
when she fainted at the cutting down of yer father? Your father," added
she, "that murdered old Meredith!"

The boy, a hardened and bold-featured fellow, became lividly pale, but
never spoke.

"Yes, my Lord," continued she, still following the theme of her own wild
fancies, "it's James Butterley's boy! Butterley that was hanged!" and
she shook and rocked with a fiendish exultation at the exposure.

"Many of us does n't know what bekem of our fathers!" said a
sly-looking, old-fashioned creature, whose height scarcely exceeded two
feet, although evidently near manhood in point of age.

"Who was yours, Mickey?" cried another.

"Father Glynn, of Luke Street," growled out the imp, with a leer.

"And yours?" said another, dragging me forward, directly in front of
Betty.

"Con Cregan, of Kilbeggan," said I, boldly.

"Success to ye, ma bouchai!" said the old hag; "and so you 're a son of
Con the informer." She looked sternly at me for a few seconds, and then,
in a slower and more deliberate tone, added, "I 'm forty years, last
Lady Day, living this way, and keepin' company with all sorts of
thieves, and rogues, and blaguards, and worse,--ay, far worse besides;
but may I never see Glory if an informer, or his brat, was under the
roof afore!"

The steadfast decision of look and voice as she spoke seemed to
impress the bystanders, who fell back and gazed at me with that kind of
shrinking terror which honest people sometimes exhibit at the contact of
a criminal.

During the pause of some seconds, while this endured, my sense of abject
debasement was at the very lowest. To be the Pariah of such a society
was indeed a most distinctive infamy.

"Are ye ashamed of yer father? Tell me that!" cried the hag, shaking me
roughly by one shoulder.

"It is not here, and before the like of these," said I, looking round at
the ragged, unwashed assemblage, "that I should feel shame! or if I did,