however, if necessary. Shane,was called Kittogue Shane, from
being left-handed. Both were butchers, and both, we believe,
alive and kicking at this day.

"And what will you do with him, Nancy?"

"Och! thin, Dick, avourneen, it's myself that's jist tired thinking of
that; at any rate, consamin' to the loose foot he'll get this blessed
month to come, Dick, agra!"

"Throth, Nancy," another mischievous monkey would exclaim, "if
you hadn't great patience entirely, you couldn't put up with such
threatment, at all at all."

"Why thin, God knows it's true for-you, Barney. D'ye hear that,
'graceless?' the very childhre making a laughing-stock and a may-game of
you!--but wait till we get under the roof, any how."

"Ned," a third would say, "isn't it a burning shame for you to break
the poor crathur's heart this a-way? Throth, but you ought to hould down
your head, sure enough--a dacent woman! that only for her you wouldn't
have a house over you, so you wouldn't."

"And throth, and the same house is going, Tim," Nancy would exclaim,
"and when it goes, let him see thin who'll do for him; let him thry if
his blackguards will stand to him, when he won't have poor foolish Nancy
at his back."

During these conversations, Ned would walk on between his two guards
with a dogged-looking and condemned face; Nancy behind him, with his own
cudgel, ready to administer an occasional bang whenever he attempted
to slacken his pace, or throw over his shoulder a growl of dissent or
justification.

On getting near home, the neighbors would occasionally pop out their
heads, with a smile of good-humored satire on their faces, which Nancy
was very capable of translating:

"Ay," she would say, addressing them, "I've caught him--here he is to
the fore. Indeed you may well laugh, Kitty Rafferty; not a one of myself
blames you for it.--Ah, ye mane crathur," aside to Ned, "if you had the
blood of a hen in you, you wouldn't have the neighbors braking their
hearts laughing at you in sich a way; and above all the people in the
world, them Rafferty's, that got the decree against us at the last
sessions, although I offered to pay within fifteen shillings of the
differ--the grubs!"

Having seen her hopeful charge safely deposited on the hob, Nancy would
throw her cloak into this corner, and her bonnet into that, with the air
of a woman absorbed by the consideration of some vexatious trial;
she would then sit down, and, lighting her d