d women, that flowed in a noiseless
stream to the chapel. It was May, "the month of Mary," as it is so
touchingly called in Ireland, and in that month there are devotions
every night in honor of the Mother of God. It was with difficulty he
restrained his tears as there rose from the voices of the congregation
the well-known and well-remembered hymn to the Blessed Virgin--the
fitting wail of a people who dwell in a land of sorrows.

"Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our Life, Our Sweetness, and Our
Hope, to thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we
send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears." How
well he recalled the evening long ago, when the hymn first struck him as
the wail from the helpless agony of a dying nation.

Then Mat went home, and, as he entered the house, he noticed with the
new-born light in his eyes many things that had escaped his attention
when he first entered there in the morning. His father, as he answered
the door, seemed to him to have aged ten years since he had looked at
him in the morning, and he saw with a pang that seemed to squeeze his
heart as in a vice that his clothes were shabby, and that even his boots
were patched and broken. Then he went upstairs, and, entering the parlor
noiselessly, caught sight of his mother. She turned sharply around, and
to his horror and surprise he saw a fierce, violent blush overspread her
pale cheek. He could not help looking at the table, and there he saw the
same dread sight that had met him at so many painful crises in his life,
for his mother was examining bank bills and pawn tickets. Then he rushed
back in memory to the days of his own childhood, when he had wondered
why it was that his mother occasionally wept as she turned over these
mysterious slips of blue paper and small pieces of stiff card. The
abject failure of his life never appeared to him so clearly as it did at
that moment, and the sense of complete disaster was aggravated by the
awful feeling that he had made others suffer even more bitterly than
himself. And for a moment it seemed, too, as if his mother were resolved
that he should taste the full bitterness of the moral, for she looked at
him fixedly as the blush died from her cheeks; but her heart was too
touched by his look of pain, and in a moment she had kissed him on the
cheek, after the frigid and self-restrained fashion of Ballybay.

Mat had a battle with himself as to whether he should visit