p little; keep always advancing; and you'll never
have cause to rue the day that you first saw Even Trot.'

We need scarcely add that Biddy won the kemp and the husband, and that
she and Shaun lived long and happily together; and I have only now to
wish, kind reader, that you and I may live longer and more happily
still.

THE YOUNG PIPER

BY CROFTON CROKER

There lived not long since, on the borders of the county Tipperary, a
decent honest couple, whose names were Mick Flannigan and Judy
Muldoon. These poor people were blessed, as the saying is, with four
children, all boys: three of them were as fine, stout, healthy,
good-looking children as ever the sun shone upon; and it was enough to
make any Irishman proud of the breed of his countrymen to see them
about one o'clock on a fine summer's day standing at their father's
cabin door, with their beautiful flaxen hair hanging in curls about
their head, and their cheeks like two rosy apples, and a big laughing
potato smoking in their hand. A proud man was Mick of these fine
children, and a proud woman, too, was Judy; and reason enough they had
to be so. But it was far otherwise with the remaining one, which was
the third eldest: he was the most miserable, ugly, ill-conditioned
brat that ever God put life into; he was so ill-thriven that he never
was able to stand alone, or to leave his cradle; he had long, shaggy,
matted, curled hair, as black as the soot; his face was of a
greenish-yellow colour; his eyes were like two burning coals, and were
for ever moving in his head, as if they had the perpetual motion.
Before he was a twelvemonth old he had a mouth full of great teeth;
his hands were like kites' claws, and his legs were no thicker than
the handle of a whip, and about as straight as a reaping-hook: to
make the matter worse, he had the appetite of a cormorant, and the
whinge, and the yelp, and the screech, and the yowl, was never out of
his mouth.

The neighbours all suspected that he was something not right,
particularly as it was observed, when people, as they do in the
country, got about the fire, and began to talk of religion and good
things, the brat, as he lay in the cradle, which his mother generally
put near the fireplace that he might be snug, used to sit up, as they
were in the middle of their talk, and begin to bellow as if the devil
was in him in right earnest; this, as I said, led the neighbours to
think that all was not right, and there was a