n.

He had been born a Connemara peasant, and he would die one. When he
was ten years old he had seen some of his own family, and most of his
neighbors, starve to death. He could remember looking at the stiffened
figure of a woman stretched on the stones by the roadside, with the
green stain of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or so
older than himself, also a Madden and distantly related, had started
in despair off across the mountains to the town where it was said the
poor-law officers were dealing out food. He could recall her coming back
next day, wild-eyed with hunger and the fever; the officers had refused
her relief because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to the bone.
"While there's a calf on the shank, there's no starvation," they had
explained to her. The girl died without profiting by this official
apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably upon his brain. Now,
after a lapse of more than forty years, it seemed the thing that he
remembered best about Ireland.

He had drifted westward as an unconsidered, unresisting item in that
vast flight of the famine years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater promise than himself, had
done badly. Somehow he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
and really that seemed all there was to tell. The rest had been calm
and sequent progression--steady employment as a journeyman first; then
marriage and a house and lot; the modest start as a master; the move to
Octavius and cheap lumber; the growth of his business, always marked of
late years stupendous--all following naturally, easily, one thing out of
another. Jeremiah encountered the idea among his fellows, now and again,
that he was entitled to feel proud of all this. He smiled to himself at
the thought, and then sent a sigh after the smile. What was it all but
empty and transient vanity? The score of other Connemara boys he had
known--none very fortunate, several broken tragically in prison or the
gutter, nearly all now gone the way of flesh--were as good as he. He
could not have it in his heart to take credit for his success; it would
have been like sneering over their poor graves.

Jeremiah Madden was now fifty-three--a little man of a reddened,
weather-worn skin and a meditative, almost saddened, aspect. He had blue
eyes, but his scanty iron-gray hair showed raven black in its shadows.
The width and prominence of his cheek-bones dominated all one'