er possibilities of suffering in the Irish tragedy. Famine, plague,
a whirlwind, or an earthquake could not, as he thought, have worked
mischief more deadly, more appalling, more complete. He saw, with a
curious sinking of the heart and an overwhelming sadness, that nearly
every well-remembered spot of his boyhood was marked by the ruins of a
desolated home. Here was the corner where he used to turn from the one
to the two mile round--as two of the walks around Ballybay were
called--but where was the house with its crowd of noisy children, which
he saw every morning with the same confident familiarity as a
well-remembered piece of furniture in his own house? Yes: there was the
little road where he remembered to have stood one day so many years ago.
It was a bright, beautiful day in summer, the sky was blue, and the
roses bloomed; but everything was dark to him, for Betty, his first
nurse, the strongest affection of his childhood, had retired to her
mother's home the day before. And as he recalled how all the world
seemed to be over for him on that day, he felt the full brotherhood of
sorrow, and in one moment understood all the tragic significance of the
separation which emigration had caused in more than a million Irish
homes. The road had changed as though the country had been turned from
a civilized to a savage land. The grass was growing thick and rank, the
roses had gone, thick weeds choked festering pools, and of the little
cottage in which Betty had dwelt there was not even a vestige.

And so, alas, in the town. At its entrance a whole street had
disappeared, black and charred the walls stood--silent and deserted.
This constant recurrence of the symbols of separation, desertion,
silence, death, produced a strange numbness in his mind, and he walked
along in a dream that became deeper and deeper. But he saw everything
with the obscurity, and still with the strange, piercing look, of the
dreamer. Turning from the houses to the people, he saw as it were in a
flash the true meaning of that weary look which he had first observed as
the prevalent expression of most faces; he loathed and at the same time
he understood the prematurely bloated and blotched faces of so many of
the young men whom he met everywhere, and read the story of the hopeless
struggle against daily deepening gloom which had sought desperate relief
in whiskey. He understood the procession of sad, and, as in his exalted
mood he thought, spectral, men an