e in the
core of her heart_ was for her mother. No matter how tired, or sleepy,
or cross the baby might be, one word from _her_ would set the bright
eyes dancing, and the little rosy month smiling, and the tiny limbs
quivering, as if walking or running couldn't content her, but she must
fly to her mother's arms. And how that mother doted on the very ground
she trod! I often thought that the Queen in her state carriage, with her
son, God bless him! alongside of her, dressed out in gold and jewels,
was not one bit happier than my mother, when she sat under the shade of
the mountain ash, near the door, in the hush of the summer's evening,
singing and _cronauning_ her only one to sleep in her arms. In the month
of October, 1845, Mary was four years old. That was the bitter time,
when first the food of the earth was turned to poison; when the gardens
that used to be so bright and sweet, covered with the purple and white
potato blossoms, became in one night black and offensive, as if fire had
come down from heaven to burn them up. 'Twas a heart-breaking thing to
see the laboring men, the crathurs! that had only the one half-acre to
feed their little families, going out, after work, in the evenings to
dig their suppers from under the black stalks. Spadeful after spadeful
would be turned up, and a long piece of a ridge dug through, before
they'd get a small kish full of such withered _crohauneens_,[H] as other
years would be hardly counted fit for the pigs.

It was some time before the distress reached us, for there was a trifle
of money in the savings' bank, that held us in meal, while the neighbors
were next door to starvation. As long as my father and mother had it,
they shared it freely with them that were worse off than themselves; but
at last the little penny of money was all spent, the price of flour was
raised; and, to make matters worse, the farmer that my father worked
for, at a poor eight-pence a day, was forced to send him and three more
of his laborers away, as he couldn't afford to pay them even _that_ any
longer. Oh! 'twas a sorrowful night when my father brought home the
news. I remember, as well as if I saw it yesterday, the desolate look in
his face when he sat down by the ashes of the turf fire that had just
baked a yellow meal cake for his supper. My mother was at the opposite
side, giving little Mary a drink of sour milk out of her little wooden
piggin, and the child didn't like it, being delicate and always