hat you may have a right to expect, and not to a girl like Mary
Finigan, that could lay down guineas where you could hardly find
shillings.'

* Cows without horns.

** Esker; a high ridge of land, generally barren and
unproductive, when upon a small scale. It is also a ridgy
height that runs for many miles through a country.

"'Very well, Susy,' says Dick, nettled enough, as he well might, 'I
say to you, just as I say to your daughter, if you be proud there's no
force.'"

"But what has this to do with you, Shane?" asked Andy Morrow; "sure we
wanted to hear an account of your wedding, but instead of that, it's
Dick Cuillenan's history you're giving us."

"That's just it," said Shane; "sure, only for this same Dick, I'd never
got Mary Finigan for a wife. Dick took Susy's advice, bekase, after all,
the undacent drop was in him? or he'd never have brought the bottle
out of the house at all; but, faith he riz up, put the whiskey in his
pocket, and went home with a face on him as black as my hat with venom.
Well, things passed on till the Christmas following, when one night,
after the Finigans had all gone to bed, there comes a crowd of fellows
to the door, thumping at it with great violence, and swearing that if
the people within wouldn't open it immediately, it would be smashed into
smithereens. The family, of coorse, were all alarmed; but somehow or
other, Susy herself got suspicious that it might be something about
Mary, so up she gets, and sends the daughter to her own bed, and lies
down herself in the daughter's.

"In the mane time, Finigan got up, and after lighting a candle, opened
the door at once. 'Come, Finigan,' says a strange voice, 'put out the
candle, except you wish us to make a candlestick of the thatch,' says
he--'or to give you a prod of a bagnet under the ribs,' says he.

"It was a folly for one man to go to bell-the-cat with a whole crowd;
so he blew the candle out, and next minute they rushed in, and went as
straight as a rule to Mary's bed. The mother all the time lay close, and
never said a word. At any rate, what could be expected, only that, do
what she could, at the long-run she must go? So according, after a very
hard battle on her side, being a powerful woman, she was obliged to
travel--but not till she had left many of them marks to remimber her by;
among the rest, Dick himself got his nose split on his face, with the
stroke of a churn-staff, so that he carried half a