shore, with
their brothers and friends, on summer evenings, when their work was
done--or sometimes rowing over the lake, their plain brown faces
lighted up with innocent enjoyment, and their gay songs and happy
laughter ringing out over the water.

There was one young man, braver or more persevering than most of
Kathleen's untitled admirers, who would not be frowned off by her
ambitious parents;--perhaps because he was encouraged by the kind
smiles of the beautiful girl herself. This was a young tradesman,
named Barry O'Donoghue--a fine, manly fellow, industrious, intelligent,
and though not rich, in better circumstances than most young men of the
parish. But when "bold Barry O'Donoghue," as he was called, proposed
to Michael More for the hand of his daughter, he received as stern and
scornful a "No, young man," as any who had been before him. Barry had
a proud as well as a loving heart, and felt the slight and
disappointment so keenly that he left his home at once, and sailed for
Australia, to seek his fortune in that rich, but then almost unknown
land. People laughed, and said that Mickey and Biddy More were keeping
their daughter for "_the_ O'Donoghue"--expecting him to come for her,
some May-day morning, in grand style, riding over the waves on his
silver-shining steed, to carry her off to his palace under the lake.
But when it was seen how poor Kathleen took Barry's going to heart, few
were so unfeeling as to laugh. She never had been as merry as most
young girls, and now she grew sad and silent and very weary-looking.
She did not complain, but her eyes seemed heavy with the tears she
would not shed, and the roses went fading and fading out of her cheeks,
till her father became alarmed, and would bid her eat more, and spin
less--to get up early in the morning and drink new milk, "with a drop
of mountain-dew in it." ("Mountain-dew," I must tell you, is an Irish
name for whisky.) "Ah darling," her mother would say, "if you don't
howld on to your beauty, what'll his lordship say, when he comes after
you? Sure, he'll consider himself imposed upon."

"But mother, dear," Kathleen would reply, "I don't want any lord--I'll
just stay with father and you, always as I am."

"Hush now, you simple child! It's just flying in the face of
Providince, you are--your fortune has all been foretowld this many a
year, and you've only to submit to it--though you don't desarve it."

Well, one May-day morning, when Barry O'Don