be discontented with herself, and to think that she had not played
her part as well as she might. In fact, she felt herself to be
miserable, and, for the time, hated her brother and Father John for
having made her so.

Father John walked sorrowfully back to his cottage, thinking Miss
Feemy Macdermot the most stiff-necked young lady it had ever been his
hard lot to meet.

CHAPTER IX.

MOHILL.

We must now request our reader to accompany us to the little town of
Mohill; not that there is anything attractive in the place to repay
him for the trouble of going there.

Mohill is a small country town, standing on no high road, nor on any
thoroughfare from the metropolis; and therefore it owes to itself
whatever importance it may possess--and, in truth, that is not
much. It is, or, at any rate, was, at the time of which we are
writing, the picture of an impoverished town--the property of a
non-resident landlord--destitute of anything to give it interest or
prosperity--without business, without trade, and without society.
The idea that would strike one on entering it was chiefly this: "Why
was it a town at all?--why were there, on that spot, so many houses
congregated, called Mohill?--what was the inducement to people to
come and live there?--Why didn't they go to Longford, to Cavan, to
Carrick, to Dublin,--anywhere rather than there, when they were going
to settle themselves?" This is a question which proposes itself at
the sight of many Irish towns; they look so poor, so destitute of
advantage, so unfriended. Mohill is by no means the only town in the
west of Ireland, that strikes one as being there without a cause.

It is built on the side of a steep hill, and one part of the town
seems constantly threatening the destruction of the other. Every now
and again, down each side of the hill, there is a slated house, but
they are few and far between; and the long spaces intervening are
filled with the most miserable descriptions of cabins--hovels without
chimneys, windows, door, or signs of humanity, except the children
playing on the collected filth in front of them. The very scraughs
of which the roofs are composed are germinating afresh, and, sickly
green with a new growth, look more like the tops of long-neglected
dungheaps, than the only protection over Christian beings from the
winds of heaven.

Look at that mud hovel on the left, which seems as if it had thrust
itself between its neighbours, so narrow is i