gs it back, you throw it again, and I will go in and
try to find your mother; I think I see her now," she added, as she
turned the angle of the house and caught a glimpse of Mrs. Davitt,
seated in the wooden rocking-chair beside the kitchen-table, paring
potatoes.

To the casual glance she was only a homely old Irish woman who might
have been the original of "The shape which shape had none." The only
semblance of waist was the line drawn by her gingham apron-string. Her
form bulged where it should have been straight, and was straight where
it should have curved. Her face, however, had a gentle motherliness,
and still bore traces of the comeliness which had marked it a quarter
of a century earlier, when, as Bridget O'Hara, she had set sail from
"the owld counthry" to try her fortune in the new.

After a few months' experience of city life over here, she had drifted
to South East, where she found employment in a thread factory which
stood on the bank of the tiniest stream that ever, outside of England,
called itself a river. Its current ran swiftly, however; its mimic
falls were forced into the service of trade; and the wheels of the
thread factory whirred busily, except when bad times brought wheels
and bobbins to a standstill.

For three years after her arrival in South East, Bridget O'Hara stood
beside her wheel, and fed her bobbin faithfully. Her blue Irish eyes
were bright in those days, and her cheeks red as the roses of County
Meath, where the thatched homestead of the O'Haras lifted its humble
head. More than one of the men working in the factory took notice of
the blue eyes and the red cheeks, and would have been glad to secure
their owner for a wife; but she was not for any of them. Before she
had been in the village six months, she had given her faithful heart
to Michael Davitt, the young New England fisherman whose boat lay
below the bridge which she crossed every morning on her way to her
work in the factory. Many a time on bright spring mornings she
loitered on the bridge, leaning over its wooden railing to watch
Michael as he washed out his boat, and made ready for the day's sail.
Sometimes the talk grew so absorbing that the factory bell sounded out
its last warning call before Bridget could tear herself away, and
afterward, through the long day, shut up among the whirring wheels, in
the dust and heat of the big dreary room, she kept the vision of the
white flapping sail, and of Michael Davitt standing