it
before you were a day under the roof."

The young girl blushed deeply; for, humble as the praise might have
sounded to other ears, to hers it was the most touching she could have
listened to.

"I 'm not flattering you a bit. 'T is your own mother you take after;
you might put her down in the bleakest spot of Ireland, and 't is a
garden she 'd make it. Let her stop for shelter in a cabin, and before
the shower was over you 'd not know the place. It would be all swept
and clean, and the dishes ranged neatly on the dresser; and the pig she
could n't abide a pig turned out, and the hens driven into the cowshed,
and the children's faces washed, and their hair combed, and, maybe, the
little gossoon of five years old upon her knee, saying his 'Hail, Mary,'
or his 'A B C,' while she was teaching his mother how to wind the
thread off the wheel; for she could spin a hank of yarn as well as any
cottier's wife in the townland. The kind creature she was! But she never
had a taste for real diversion; it always made her low-spirited and
sad."

"Perhaps the pleasures you speak of were too dearly purchased, papa,"
said Nelly.

"Indeed, maybe they were," said he, dubiously, and as though the thought
had now occurred for the first time; "and, now that you say it, I begin
to believe it was that same that might have fretted her. The way she was
brought up made her think so, too. That brother was always talking about
wastefulness, and extravagance, and so on; and, if it was in her nature,
he 'd have made her as stingy as himself; and look what it comes to
after all. We spent it when we had it, the Daltons are a good warrant
for that; and there was he grubbing and grabbing all his days, to leave
it after him to a rich man, that does n't know whether he has so many
thousands more or not."

Nelly made no reply, not wishing to encourage, by the slightest apparent
interest, the continuance on the theme which invariably suggested her
father's gloomiest reveries.

"Is that her trunk, Nelly?" said Dalton, breaking silence after a
long interval, and pointing to an old and journey-worn valise that lay
half-open upon the floor.

"Yes, papa," said Nelly, with a sigh.

"Why, it's a mean-looking, scrubby bit of a thing; sure it 's not the
size of a good tea-chest," said he, angrily.

"And yet too roomy for all its contents, papa. Poor Kate's wardrobe is a
very humble one."

"I 'd like to know where 's the shops here; where 's the milliner