Chapter VII (6)

The little village of Easky, in the County Sligo, was, when this present century was young, one of those lonesome, scanty-peopled hamlets whose very loneliness and isolation render them more dear and homelike to their few inhabitants. The waters of the Northern Ocean foamed about the rocks where its fisher-boats were moored. The feet of its rambling children trod the rough paths and crumpled the grey masses of the wild Slieve-Gamph hills. Thus hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, it was almost separated from the world. The white sails that now and then flitted across the far horizon, and the slow, lazy car that twice a month brought over his majesty's mail-bags from Dromore, were all that Easky ever had to tell it that there were nations and kingdoms on the earth, or that its own precipices on the one side, and its weed-strewn rocks upon the other, did not embrace the whole of human joys and sorrows.

In this solitary village the forefathers of Patrick Carrol had dwelt for immemorial years. So far back as tradition went they had been fishermen, and the last remaining scion now followed the ancestral calling. He was a sort of hero among his fellow-villagers. True, he was as poor as the poorest of them all, and had no personal boast save of his vigorous arms and honest heart. But his father, contrary to the custom of his race, had refused to lay his bones within an ocean bed, and had died fighting in the bloody streets of Killala. All victims of '98 were canonized by those rude freemen, and the mantle of honor fell from the father upon the children, and gave to Patrick Carrol a deserved and well-maintained pre-eminence. And so, when Bridget Deery became his wife, the whole hamlet agreed that the village favorite had found her proper husband, and, when the little Mary saw the light, the christening holiday was kept by every neighbor, old or young.

Four years of perfect happiness flew by. Death or misfortune came to other families, but not to theirs. The little hoarded wealth, hid away in the dark corner, grew yearly greater. Health and affection dwelt unremittingly upon the hearthstone, and the hearts of the father and mother were as full of gratitude as the heart of the child was of merriment and glee. But the four years had an end, and carried with them, into the trackless past, the sunshine of their lives. {388} One long, long summer day the wife sat among the rocks, watching for her husband's boat, and playing with the prattler at her side. The boat came not. The sun went down. The gathering clouds in the offing loomed up threateningly. The hoarse northwesters felt their way across the waters, and whistled in her ears, as she clasped the child to her bosom and hurried home out of the storm. As the gale strengthened with the darkness, she fell upon her knees, and all that wakeful night besought the Mother and the saints to keep her baby's father from the awful danger. In vain; for when the morning dawned, the waves washed up his oars and helm upon the beach, and an hour later his drowned corse was found beneath the broken crags of Anghris Head.

For the first few years after that fatal shock the widowed mother lived she knew not how. One by one the treasured silver pieces went, till destitution stared her in the face. The charity of her neighbors outdid their means, but even that could not keep her from actual suffering, and work for the lone woman there was absolutely none. What wonder was it, then, that, when the flowers had bloomed three times above the peaceful bed of Patrick Carrol, his widow, more for her child's sake than her own, consented to violate the sanctity of her broken heart, and become the wife of Bernard Davanagh?

Bernard was a bold, reckless, wilful man, and both the mother and the child soon felt the difference between the dead father and the living. As time passed on, and the boy Bernard was born, the passions of the man grew stronger, and cruel words, and still more cruel blows, became the daily portion of the helpless three. Oh! how often did the widow yearn to lie down with her children by her dead husband's side, in the drear churchyard, and be at peace for ever. But not _without_ them. No, not even to be united with the lost, could she have left them, and so they clung together, closer and closer, as the years rolled on--knowing little of life except its dark page of sorrow.

There never yet was a life without some ray of joy, and, even in the midnight darkness which hung around the childhood of Mary Carrol, there were faint gleams of happiness. Next door but one to their poor cot lived James Herican. He too was a fisherman, and, in better days, had been Patrick Carrol's most intimate and faithful friend. He had remained such to the widow and the fatherless, and, but for him, the family of Bernard Davanagh also might sometimes have perished from want and cold. He was the father of one child, the boy Michael, older by two years than Mary, and doubly endeared to his heart by the mother's early death. The gossips of Easky had wondered, in their simple way, why James Herican and Bridget Carrol did not marry, but the memory of his dead wife and his dead friend forbade the one ever to entertain the thought, and the poor widow was as far from wishing it as he. They were happier as they were; he, by his kindness and true Christian charity, laying up heavenly treasures, which, as the second husband of a second wife, he never could accumulate; she, keeping ever fresh and pure the one love of her maiden's heart, the one hope of reunion in the skies. What, and how different, the end had been, if they had married, the eye of the Eternal can alone discern.

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The friendship of these parents descended to the children. In all their sports, their rambles, their labors, (for in that toiling hamlet even tender childhood labored,) Michael Herican and Mary Carrol were together. When her half-brother, eight years younger than herself, grew into boyhood, Michael was his champion against the impositions of larger boys, and taught him all those arts of wood and water craft which village youth so ardently aspire to, and so aptly learn. It could not happen otherwise than that these constantly recurring kindnesses should beget firm and fast affection, and knit together these young hearts in bonds difficult, if not impossible, to sunder.

It may have been the law of nature, it may have been the chastening of God, that Michael Herican and Mary Carrol should come, in later years, to love each other. It was simply fitting, to all human sight, that it should be so; and it was so. The father and the mother thanked God for it, day by day, and bestowed upon them such tokens of encouragement as the bashful lovers could comfortably receive. The boy Bernard, when he heard of it, (and there could be no secrets in Easky,) threw up his cap for joy, and the old village crones for once smiled on the prospects of a happiness they had never known. Only Davanagh appeared displeased, but his abuse of the poor girl had been so extreme for years that it could scarcely suffer any increase, and all the influence he exerted over her or them was by his ruthless fist and cursing tongue. This at last ceased; for ears less patient than her own received his stinging insults, and a blow, quicker than his drunken arm could parry, stretched him upon the ground to rise no more.

Mary Carrol reached her twentieth birthday. She was a frail, delicate girl, below the middle height, and with that beautiful but strange union of large blue eyes and pearly complexion with jet black hair and lashes which tells at once of the pure Irish blood. We should not have called her handsome; perhaps no one would, except those who loved her, and in whose sight no disfigurement or disease could have made her homely. But she was one of those superior natures which solitude and suffering must unite with Christian culture to produce; and the whole neighborhood, for this, and not for her beauty, claimed her as its favorite and charm. Michael had grown to be a stalwart man, half a head taller than his sire, and his fellows said that none among them promised better for diligence and success than he. His devotion to Mary Carrol knew no bounds, and she, in turn, cherished scarcely a thought apart from him. Her mother had rapidly grown old and broken. Grief, and that yearning for the dead which is stronger than any sorrow, had made her an aged woman long before her time, and the fond daughter, between her and the one hope of her young life, had no third wish or joy. Her only trouble was for her brother. The wild elements of his father's nature became more apparent in him every day, and, though he loved his mother and half-sister with an almost inhuman passionateness, they frequently found it impossible to restrain his turbulent and curbless will. The stern control of a seafaring life seemed to be their only chance of saving him, and so, at little more than twelve years old, he was torn away from home and friends and sent out on a coasting merchantman to be subdued. This parting nearly broke his mothers's heart, but her discipline of suffering had been borne too long and patiently for her to rebel now. It was only another drop to her full cup of bitterness, when, a few months later, news came, by word of mouth from a sailor in Dromore, that the merchantman had foundered in the stormy Irish Sea.

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It would be beyond the power of human pen to describe how these lone women now clung to Michael Herican. His father went down to the grave in peace, and he had none but them, as they had none but him. Already the one looked on him as a husband and the other as a son. When a few more successful voyages were over, and when the humble necessaries, which even an Easky maid could not become a wife without providing, were completed, the benediction of the church was to fulfil the promise of their hearts, and give them irrevocably to each other in the sight of God and man.

It was an ill-starred day for Michael Herican and the Carrols when the Widow Moran and her daughter came to live in Easky. Pierre Moran, deceased, had been a small shopkeeper in Sligo, where he had amassed a little competence, and, now that he was dead, his widow returned to her native village to pass her remaining life among her former neighbors. There were few among them who had not known more or less about the reckless girl who ran away with the half-French half-Irish shopman, twenty years ago, and her name and memory was none of the best among those virtuous villagers. But she cared less for this because she had enough of filthy lucre to command exterior respect, and it was better, so she thought, to be highest among the lowly than to be low among the high. In coming to Easky she had had two ends in view: to queen it over her former associates, and to secure a steady and good husband for her daughter. Kitty Moran was like her mother, but without her mother's faults. She was a girl of dash and spirit, and with a pride as quick and a nature as impressible as her mother was emotionless. She was a thorough brunette, with a brunette's violence and passion, with a brunette's power to love and power to hate. In actual beauty no maiden of the neighborhood could vie with her, and she had just enough of city polish and refinement to give her an appearance of superiority to those around her. Between her and Mary Carrol the angels would not have hesitated in choosing--unless, indeed, they were those ancient sons of God who took wives from among the daughters of men because they saw that they were fair, and then, like men, they would have chosen wrongly.

It was not many days before the Widow Moran heard of Michael Herican, or many weeks before she had decided that he should be the husband of her child. True, she knew of his betrothal, for his name was rarely spoken unconnected with the name of Mary Carrol, but this made no difference. The pale-faced step-daughter of the drunken Davanagh was of no consequence to her, and to the right or wrong of her designs she never gave a thought. Whatever she wished, she determined to have. Whatever she determined to have, she set herself industriously to secure. So when she marketed, it was Michael's boat from which she purchased. When there was a message to send to Sligo, or packages from thence to be brought home to her, it was Michael's boat that carried it. When she had work to be done around her cottage, it waited until Michael had an idle day, and then he was hired to do it. Well skilled, as every woman is, in arts like these, she used her knowledge and her chances all too well.

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It is but just to say that Kitty Moran had no share in her mother's wicked plans. She was young and gay. Michael Herican was the finest young man in the village. It was not disagreeable to her to watch him and to talk with him, as he worked by her directions in the little garden, or to sit beside him at their noontide meal. Unconsciously, she grew to miss him when he was away at sea, to have a welcome for him in her heart when he came home, to look for him with impatience when she knew that his vocation brought him back to her. Before she was aware of it, she loved him; and when she realized her love, she threw herself into it, as her one absorbing passion, without a dream of its results or a suspicion of her error. She would not, for an empire, have deliberately wronged the patient girl whom, by the stern law of contraries, she had already learned to cherish, but to her love there was no limit, no moderation. She could not help loving Michael Herican, and no more could she mete out or restrain her love. So, when it mastered her, it _was_ her master, and her reason and her conscience were whirled away before the rushing tide of passion like bubbles on the bosom of a cataract.

How Michael Herican came to love this new maiden not even he himself could tell. Rochefoucault says, "It is in man's power neither to love nor to refrain from loving." And false as this may be as a general law of life, there are cases in which it appears almost divinely true. It was so in his. He simply could not help it. When he compared the calm, deep, tried affection of the heart that had been his for years with the tumultuous outburst of this impetuous soul, his judgment taught him there ought to be no such comparison between them. He never had one doubt as to his duty. He fought nobly and manfully against the spell that seemed to be upon him. He would gladly have left Easky, and have stretched his voyages beyond the northern seas; but he could not leave Mary and her mother there alone. He thought of hastening his marriage, thereby to put an end to all possibility of faithlessness, (and this is what he should have done,) but he had no reason for it that he dared to give. It was a fearful trial for him, and would have bred despair in stronger hearts than his, if such there be. He became lax and careless in his business, harsh and moody in his intercourse with others. A few tattling croakers, here and there, wiser than the rest, laid the evil at the Widow Moran's door; but they could give no proof when asked for it, and the frowns and chidings of the neighborhood soon put them down.

In this way things went on for months. The day drew near when the wedding-feast should usher in a new life to the waiting pair. It was a drawing near of doom to him. The enchantment had not weakened by indulgence. The siren's song was as soft and seductive as when its first notes took possession of his soul. Feeling as he did toward Kathleen Moran, he would not marry Mary Carrol, although from his heart of hearts he could have sworn that his love for her had known no change or diminution. Nor did he dare to tell her that the fascinations of the stranger had enchained him; for he knew that he was all she had, and all she loved. But it could not go on thus always, and he knew it. Something must be done. Had it been the mere sacrifice of himself, he would not have hesitated for a moment. As little did he hesitate between marrying where he did not love supremely, and not marrying at all. {392} He had a conscience, and when his conscience decided between these, and told him that he must not marry Mary Carrol, it compelled him also to go to her and in plain words tell her so.

It almost killed her. The shock was so great, at the moment, mightily though she strove to command herself, that her life was in immediate danger. After a while she rallied again, a very ghost to what she had been, though little else before. Her mother bore the blow less calmly. She could not understand the powerlessness of the one to save himself, or the self-sacrifice of the other, which gave up her life's last greatest hope without a murmur. She felt the disappointment keenly, but the injury more. Dispositions, that through all her sorrows had never been apparent in her character, began to show themselves. She grew stem and vengeful in place of her old meekness and submission, and brooded over their cruel wrong until it became a second nature with her to impute to Michael Herican all her troubles, and curse him in her heart as the destroyer of her child.

Of course all Easky soon knew the grief that had come to Bridget Davanagh's household; and, not unnaturally, most of them sided with her in her condemnation of Michael Herican. They could not understand, they would not have believed, that he was under the dominion of a passion which he could neither escape nor resist. To them there was no fascination in the Widow Moran's daughter, and they loved the mother too little for them to suppose that any one could love the child. It was a hard lot for her, poor girl, to hear their cutting censures passed upon her as the cause of Mary Carrol's sufferings; for the people of that uncultivated neighborhood did not care to conceal their bitterness beneath soft-spoken words, and did not hesitate to tell her to her face all that they felt concerning her. Nor spared they Michael Herican. Old men and young greeted him now with looks askance and cold, instead of the warm welcomes which every hearth had had for him a month before. And every woman in Easky, except the few old crones who grudgingly had wished him well when all was well with him, went by him on the other side, and prayed the saints to deliver their young maidens from such faithless lovers as he.

Intolerable as all this was to him, and unjust as it would have been, even in their sight who did it, could they have known how he had fought against his destiny, it still had its inevitable effect upon him. As there was but one house in Easky where he met a cordial greeting, that house became his continual resort. As there was but one heart into which he could look and find responsive love, he sought his consolation in that heart alone. To Mary Carrol he would gladly have continued to be a friend and brother, but her mother would not suffer him to come inside the doors, and if the broken-hearted maiden could have received his kindnesses, they would have been to her a mockery worse than death. Thus Kathleen Moran's was sometimes the only voice he heard for days, her smile the only smile ever bestowed upon him, and she became, in time, as necessary to his existence as Eve to Adam. They were almost always together. He made longer voyages, and took longer rests; and, when on shore, rarely left the roof under which she dwelt. But he had no definite aim and purpose for which to earn, or to lay up his earnings. He never trusted himself to plan for, or look upon the future. {393} He never yet had dreamed of marrying Kitty Moran. The light had fallen out of his life as effectually as out of Mary Carrol's; and it would have seemed to him as bootless to have heaped together money as it would to her to have finished and arranged her bridal gear.

A year like this told terribly upon him. The indignation of the villagers did not abate with time, and more and more did Michael Herican become an outlaw. It was strange that an event which, in the swift whirl of our metropolitan career, we meet almost every day, should have made such an impression on the minds of sturdy men and women. But it was the first time, in the memory of man, that an Easky lover had proved faithless to an Easky maid, and these rude hearts were as honest in their hate as in their love. He bore it as long as he could, but he was only human; and when the Widow Moran, herself made most uncomfortable by the active hostility of her neighbors, determined to return to Sligo, he was only too willing to go with her. He sold the little cottage where his forefathers had lived and died for many generations, and bade farewell for ever to the home where he had known so many years of happiness, such months of weary suffering.

If Mary Carrol suffered less in conscience and in self-respect than Michael Herican, her suffering made far more fearful havoc with her bodily and mental health. The privations of her childhood had sown the seeds of premature decay; and, at her best and strongest, she was frail and weakly. The shock she had sustained when her life's hopes were shattered had partially unsettled her mind, and physical disease, now slowly developing, sank her into hopeless imbecility. She was not violent or peevish. She never needed any restraint, and, usually, but little care. She would sit all day in the sunlight, listening to the roaring of the sea, her hands folded in her lap, and her great blue eyes gazing out vacantly into the sky. She knew enough to keep herself from danger, and, at long intervals would go alone into the narrow street, and wander up and down, groping her way like a blind person, yet taking no notice of anything that passed around her. It was a sad sight, indeed, for any eyes to see, but, far more so to those who knew her history, and could repeat the story of the cruel wound she bore. There was not among them a heart that did not bleed for her, and scarce a hand that could not have been nerved to vengeance, if the blood of her destroyer could have put away her doom.

The old woman--God knows how old in sorrows!--became more firm and resolute as her daughter grew more helpless. She never wearied in doing all that a mother's heart could prompt, but it was gall and bitterness to her that Mary suffered so uncomplainingly. If she could once have heard her say one hateful word of Michael Herican, it would have satisfied her, but she never did. She learned that Michael had left his home, and had gone with the Morans, and she felt as if she were robbed of her prey. Not that she ever purposed ill to him, but she did wish it, and the scoffs and denunciations of his neighbors seemed to her so many weapons in her hands against him. Alas! for her that this should be the lot of Patrick Carrol's bride.

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It might have been a half year since the widow and her victim left Easky, and the midsummer days had come. Mary Carrol had been so long an invalid, and, in her many wanderings, had been so singularly free from harm, that her absence from the cottage caused her mother no surprise or fear. The village children, as they met her rambling in the fields, would sometimes lead her home, and the seaward-going fishermen would often watch her footsteps on the beach with fond solicitude; but they became accustomed to it by and by, and let her have her way.

One cloudless day in July she had strayed out at early dawn while the dew was scarcely dry, and wandered off along the shore, beyond the furthest cottage. The matron of that house, as she went by, sent out her little boy to see that she came to no danger, but in a moment he returned to say that she was sitting on a broken rock out of the water's reach, and so for the time she was forgotten. The day wore on, and Bridget Davanagh grew lonely in her desolate home. A dread of coming evil fell upon her, and, though her cup already so ran over that she could hardly realize the possibility of further misfortune, she could not shake off the new shadow. Restless and uneasy, she started out to seek her child. She hurried past the village eastwardly along the sands. She peered into every crevice of the rocky coast that was large enough to hide a sea-gull's nest, and hunted behind every fallen fragment that might conceal the object of her quest. Slowly, for it was severest toil to her aged feet, she groped over one mile after another, until the lofty cap of Anghris Head rose up before her. She had never been so near it since that fearful day, long years ago, when she came out to see the mangled body of her young husband lying underneath its stormy crags. And now there came over her an impulse to go there once again; again to visit the place where the waves cast him in their murderous wrath; the place whither she event last to meet him when he last came home to her. So she climbed over the huge boulders, one by one, in the declining sunlight, till she stood directly underneath that ragged spire which Anghris lifts aloft above the waves, and there she saw the spot where her beloved had lain in his sad hour of death. There, too, she found her daughter, lying on the same rocky couch where her father lay before her, one arm beneath her head, her face turned up to heaven in the unbreaking slumber of the dead.

This same midsummer's day brought news, from Sligo to Easky, that Michael Herican had married Kitty Moran, and that the widow's heartless schemes had been accomplished.

The house of Bridget Davanagh was now desolate indeed. Her son lost for ever in the unknown waters. Her daughter sleeping in the village churchyard, bearing the burden of her cross no more. There was no cheer for her in the well-meant gossip of her neighbors. There was no comfort for her in the promise of a land, beyond this mortal, of perpetual rest. If her religious instincts and principles were still alive, they remained dumb and dormant. She could not read. She loved not company. Her few personal necessities rendered much bodily toil superfluous, and, when her work was done, she had no other occupation than to sit down and brood over her sorrows. The range of her thought was narrow. She had no future to look forward to. Her eyes were only on the past, and the past held for her but two figures--her murdered Mary and her Mary's murderer. It was in vain that the good parish priest sought to divert her mind and lead her to better things; for, though she said but little and that quietly, he could see, like all who now came intimately near her, that her faculties were clouded and her control over her will and imagination almost totally destroyed.

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How long she might have lived thus without becoming fully crazed was, fortunately, never tested. A letter came to her one evening, bearing a foreign post-mark, and dotted over with the many colored stamps which tell of journeys upon sea and land. It was the first letter she had ever received. No relative or friend, no acquaintance except Michael Herican, has she out of Easky, and she was sorely puzzled, as she broke the seal and turned the pages up and down and sideways, in the useless attempt to tell from whence it came. She called in a passing school-child to decipher it, and, as he blundered through its weary lines, she sat with her face buried in her hands, rocking her body ceaselessly to and fro. He reached the end and read the signature of "Bernard Davanagh." The widow's boy still lived. She lifted her worn face out of her hands and the tears chased each other down her cheeks. They eased her throbbing brain, and she bade the child go over it again, for of its first reading she had scarcely heard a word except the name. And now she learned that he was in America. He had been left sick on shore, at the last voyage of his ill-fated vessel, and escaped alive. Since then he had been tossed on every sea which bears a name, till, tired of the toil and danger, he had settled in the far-off mining regions of the western continent. He now sent for her and Mary to come out to him, enclosing money and passage certificates for each, and saying that in two month's time he hoped to have them both with him in his new home. It was a long time before the old woman could comprehend the message; but, when she once really understood that Bernard was alive, she would have started on the instant to reach her boy. Her idea of the distance was, that America lay somewhere out beyond Dromore, as far, perhaps, as that was from Easky, and it was with difficulty that the neighbors, who came flocking in when the news went flitting up and down the street, could control her. Those who stayed with her through the night, and those who went back homeward, had settled it, however, before morning dawned, that, though the journey might be fearful and the chances few, it was better she should go and perish by the way, than stay at home to grieve, and craze, and die.

There was not much preparation. Her cottage sold, her furniture distributed among her friends, the other passage-paper given to a woman in Dromore, who eagerly grasped the chance of going out to seek her husband, and Bridget Davanagh left Easky and its graves for ever. The emigrant best knows the weariness and hardship of a steerage passage in a crowded ship, and this old and worn-out woman endured them as a thousand others, old and feeble, have done since then and before. But the long voyage had an end some time, and, in a day after the ship was moored at New York wharves, the mother had found her son. He had a cabin built and furnished, deep in the wild gorge of a mountain, out of whose sides the glittering anthracite was torn by hundreds of tons a day; and here he took her to live and care for him. Not a face around her that she ever saw before; the dialect of their language so differing from her own that she could only here and there make out a word; Bernard himself grown up into a tall, stout, burly man, black with dust and reeking with soot and oil, she longed almost fiercely for her home by the green sea, and wished herself back again a score of times a day. {396} When her homesickness wore off, as it slowly did, and she formed new acquaintances, and grew familiar with the scenes around her; above all, when she began to realize the comforts which the new world gave beyond the old--she became reconciled to her strange life, and seemed almost herself again. Only when, now and then, her spite and hatred to the name of Herican broke out again did her mind reel with its fury; otherwise, she was more like Bridget Davanagh in her early days of second widowhood than she had been for years.

Meanwhile, of Michael Herican. He had married Kitty Moran, as the Easky story said. It was, on his part, an act of sheer despair. Not that he did not love her. His passion had grown stronger and more absorbing every hour, and she well returned it. But it was no calm conclusion of his judgment that led him to unite his life with hers. It was more like the suicide of a felon who sees his fate before him, but would rather die by his own free act, to-day, than anticipate inevitable death to-morrow. When the Widow Moran "went to her own place," her fortune fell to them. He opened a little store, and, for a while, life, cheered by business, seemed more bearable; but misfortune followed him and, by one loss and another, both his credit and his stock were sacrificed. Honest to the last farthing, he stripped himself of everything to pay his debts, and turned himself and his young wife, to whom privation had ever been a stranger, into the streets--to work, or beg, or starve. Then, for a time, he went to sea; but the lone hours of watchful idleness upon the deep gave him too many opportunities for recollection, and he could not endure it. As a common hireling he worked about the docks, and earned by this chance toil a meagre pittance for the bare necessities of life. But he could not settle permanently to anything. Of good abilities, with strong arms and a willing heart, it was this mental burden only which unmanned him, and this pursued him everywhere and always, like an avenging ghost. Then he began to wander. From Sligo they went to Ballina, and thence to Galway, and thence to Dublin, living awhile in each, but evermore a restless, wavering, aimless man. His poor wife suffered fearfully. Deprived of all the comforts she had ever known, and cut down sometimes to a mere apology for food and clothing, she rued the day when she was born; but she never blamed her husband. Through all, she clung to him faithfully; and when she found herself, at last, in the lowest portion of the capital, and living among those whose touch in other days would have been infection, however else she murmured, it was never against him. They stayed in Dublin for a year and more. A child was born there, but it soon died from exposure and insufficient food, and this made the mother's heart uneasy, and she longed to move. A berth fell in his way on board a homeward-bound Canadian timber-ship, and he agreed to go. He also paid the passage of his wife with labor, and, in due time, their weary feet were standing on the shores of a new world, ready for other journeys and, perhaps, better paths.

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But it did not so eventuate. He was the same man still, though under other skies. There was a doom upon him. His family grew on his hands and opened in his heart new chambers of affection, but they could give no ballast to his brain. He could not anchor anywhere. The weird ship that sails up and down antarctic seas in an eternal voyage is no more harborless than was he. He fought the forests, axe in hand, and smote down many pillars of the olden fane. He toiled on board the river-craft that drift to and fro upon the broad St. Lawrence. He was a stevedore in Quebec, a laborer in Montreal. So he worked on from one town to another, fretting away his own existence, wearing out the health and strength of his devoted wife, until he reached the "States," and, by some mysterious fatality, came into the very village where Bernard Davanagh and his mother lived. Here he found work congenial to his tastes. The dark gloom of the long tunnels underground, the ghastly lamps, and, more than all, the exciting danger of the labor, kept his mind on the stretch and drowned his memory more effectually than it had ever been before. He did not know the nearness of Mary Carrol's mother. He would as soon have dreamed of meeting his dead children in the street as her, and his work late and early kept him out of sight, so that they did not hear of him.

But it happened on one Sunday morning, as he went to Mass in the great town, two miles away, that he heard the name of "Bernard" called by some one in the throng. He looked anxiously around him, and had no difficulty in recognizing, in the features of the man addressed, the son of the detested Bernard Davanagh of his youth. Had he not known the contrary, he might have thought it that very father stepped out of his grave. The recognition was not mutual, but the unquiet heart of Michael Herican reeked little of the sacrifice that day, for thinking where this new phase of his life would end. He feared no bodily injury. He had not lost his animal courage by his sufferings. But he felt like Orestes at the banquet, when he dispels with wine the knowledge of the ever-present furies, and then suddenly beholds the gorgon face pressed closely up to his. He saw in this an omen that, go where he would, the wrongs of Mary Carrol must live on outside him, as they did within.

How Bridget Davanagh and her son became aware that Michael Herican and his family were near them, it is of little consequence to know. When they did find it out, however, it was an evil greater in its results to them than to their enemy. Bernard had warmly espoused his mother's hatred, and added to it the natural fierceness of his own disposition. The discovery of her child's betrayer, and an occasional glimpse of him as he went by, revived all the old woman's vengefulness, and aggravated it beyond control. If Kathleen Herican had known all this, sick of her wandering life as she might be, she would not have stayed near them for a single hour. But she did not know it. Bernard and Bridget she had never seen in Easky, and Michael never told her they were here. Thus she, at least, lived on unconsciously, while vengeance sharpened its relentless sword for retribution, and hung it by an ever-weakening hair over the head of him she loved most of all.

Up to the morning of the fatal day no word or sign had passed between Michael Herican and either of the Davanaghs. But, as he went by to his work that morning, they both stood in their cabin door. The old woman could not resist the impulse to curse him as he passed her, and Bernard was as ready with his malison as she. {398} Michael turned up the path that led toward them, and tried to speak in friendliness, but they would not hear him. At last, exasperated by their violence and abuse, he told the mother she was mad--mad as her daughter had been before her. It was a cruel word for him to speak, cruel for them to hear; but he did not mean it. It smote upon him as he hurried off to his work, and the image of the dead Mary came back and upbraided him many times that day. He left his work early, and went home. There was a strange look in his eye which made the timid heart of Kathleen beat faster when she saw it, and he was more than usually kind and tender to her and his child. His half-eaten supper over, he took his woodman's basket, and went out to gather fagots for the morning's fire. On his way home with others who had been on the like errand, as he came opposite the Davanagh cottage, the mother and the son came out and rushed upon him. One struck him with a stone, and felled him to the earth. The other smote him with an axe, and cleft his skull. It was all over in an instant. Not a word was said. The horror-stricken neighbors stood aghast a moment. When they came to their senses, Bernard Davanagh was climbing up the mountain on the further side of the ravine, and Bridget Davanagh, with bolted doors, kept ward in her devoted house alone.

They would have lifted Michael Herican from the roadside where he lay, but he was dead. The red blood oozed out of the gaping wound. It trickled on in narrow streamlets down the path. It clotted on the feet of men and women who came to gaze upon the mangled corpse. It stained the hands, and face, and garments of his wife and baby as they lay sobbing and shrieking on his pulseless breast. It dried up in the purple sunlight of the dying day, and soaked away into the dust and ashes of the trampled street.

I have little else to tell. The circumstances of the story, as I heard them, piece by piece, left on my mind an impression which would not let me stand by and do nothing. I was satisfied that, if not absolutely crazed, the murderess had acted in a moment of exceeding passion, no doubt resulting from the rankling words her victim spoke to her on the morning of that day; and, in her unsettled state of mind, the ordinary presumptions of the law, that passion cannot last, were not reliable. It seemed unjust, to me, that she should suffer the highest penalty known to our law, when probably her guilt was actually less than that of hundreds whom a few years in the state prison give their due. I therefore drew up a petition which the presiding judge and nearly all of the convicting jury signed, praying a commutation of her sentence to imprisonment for life. The prayer was granted, and Bridget Davanagh lives and will die an inmate of the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania.

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The Philosophy Of Immigration.

It is strange that while so many of the most enlightened minds of the country are engaged in the investigation of the mysteries of social and physical sciences, so few, if any, appear to give the least attention to the phenomenon of American immigration; a study which is equal in importance to any that can come within the purview of the economist, and of much more practical value to us, nationally, than most of the developments of nature, considered in her material aspect.

The researches of geologists and astronomers often supply us with curious and pleasing discoveries, and the laws which regulate commerce and labor, manufactures and capital, are doubtless well worth the attention of intelligent public men; but not more so than the habits, qualifications, and destiny of the millions of foreigners who of late years have made their homes among us, and who are still annually coming in myriads to our shores.

It may safely be said that neither ancient nor modern history presents a parallel to this American immigration. The emigration from the plains of Shinar was a dispersion of one people over the surface of the globe, a disintegration of a nation into several fragments, each particle the nucleus of a separate and independent race, speaking a peculiar tongue, and destined to establish distinct laws and forms of religion. Ours is the convergence of many peoples to one common centre, silently arraying themselves under a uniform system of public polity, yielding up their own political predilections, and to a certain extent their creeds and language, and destined eventually to profess one faith and speak one language. Subsequent migrations in the old world offer points as strikingly dissimilar as the first great exodus. Those were nothing else than succeeding waves of population borne from one portion of the earth to the other, generally preceded and heralded by fire and sword, and ending in the subjugation and spoliation of the inhabitants of that country over which they swept with irresistible violence. Our immigrants, on the contrary, come to us in detail, peaceably to enjoy the benefits of our laws and to respect our institutions, with no thought of conquest but such as may be suggested by our yet untilled fields of the west and our comparatively undeveloped mineral treasures.

Viewed in this light, our knowledge of the past gives no rules of guidance in our relations with this new and very important element of our population, and it becomes the duty of every patriot jealous of the welfare and reputation of his land to draw lessons of wisdom from every-day, experience, in order to help direct this perennial flood of life into the most proper and useful channels. A country's true wealth lies primarily in its population; the product of its soil is its surest and most permanent concomitant. To give a helping hand and a word of cheer and advice to those future citizens and parents of citizens is the common duty of humanity and patriotism; to protect them until sufficiently domiciled to be able to protect themselves, is the absolute duty of our legislators.

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The city of New York, being the centre of the commerce of the country, is necessarily the objective point of European emigration, though many of our neighboring seaports receive their proportionate share of the precious human freight. It will be scarcely credited that in the space of twenty-one years, ending with 1867, there arrived at this city alone no less than _three million eight hundred and thirty-two thousand four hundred and four_ immigrants, or a number almost equal in amount to the entire white population of the country at the time of the Revolution. [Footnote 117] Those arrivals included natives of every country in Europe, China, Turkey, Arabia, East and West Indies, South America, Mexico, and the lower British Provinces. Emigrants from Ireland and Germany were of course largely in excess of all others. Until 1861, these two countries were nearly equally represented, the numbers from them for fourteen years previously being respectively 1,107,034 and 979,575, or nearly four fifths of the whole arrivals. Since that year the German element has largely preponderated, and is now equal to one half the entire immigration. England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland follow next in rotation, the northern countries of Europe supplying a respectable number in proportion to their sparse population, and the southern countries, like Spain and Portugal, comparatively few.

[Footnote 117: We are indebted to Bernard Casserly, Esq., the
efficient General Superintendent under the Commissioners of
Emigration, for the following official report of arrivals at
Castle Garden:

1847, 129,062
1848, 189,176
1849, 220,791
1850, 212,603
1851, 289,601
1852, 300,992
1853, 284,945
1854, 319,223
1855, 136,233
1856, 142,342
1857, 183,773
1858, 78,589
1859, 79,322
1860, 105,162
1861, 65,539
1862, 76,306
1863, 167,844
1864, 182,396
1865, 196,352
1866, 233,418
1867, 242,730

Total, 3,832,404]

It were beyond the scope of this article to enter into an extended inquiry as to the cause of this unequal abandonment of nationality on the part of our new denizens. The misgovernment of Ireland, which culminated in the terrible famine of 1846-7-8, and the natural affinity of the people of that country for the advantages afforded by free governments, will easily account for the immensity of their numbers who have sought political and social independence in this republic; while the low rewards of labor and the heavy burdens of taxation experienced by the German in his own home, form powerful incentives in his economical mind to change his condition and abandon the fatherland of which he is so justly proud. The same reasons, to a lesser extent perhaps, operate on Englishmen and Scotchmen, with the additional one of the rapid growth of our infant manufactures requiring the experience of the workmen of Leeds, Birmingham, and Glasgow. Spain and Portugal, the pioneers of immigration in former ages, though now not essentially an emigrant people, as a general rule prefer Central and South America, where their languages are spoken and their religion universally established; while France, of all European countries the least disposed to colonization, has, on account of political troubles, sent us many of her best mechanics, and Italy some of her finest artists.

With the influx of such vast unorganized masses of strangers, representing all conditions, ages, and degrees, into one port, and considering the unusual trials and dangers of a long sea-voyage, it is not to be wondered at that a great amount of sickness and distress should be developed; but we are glad to know that all that private benevolence and judicious legislation could do has been done for the unfortunate. {401} Refuges for the destitute and hospitals for the sick have been established in this neighborhood. Employment for the idle, food for the hungry, and transportation for the penniless have been provided by the Commissioners of Emigration with a free and even profuse liberality. Nearly thirty _per centum_of the total arrivals, each year, have been thus benefited without any cost whatever to the state, the money required being derived from a fund created mainly by a small commutation-tax on each emigrant passenger. Though this fund, as we have said, is especially intended for the protection and support of immigrants, a portion of it has necessarily been expended in the erection or purchase of valuable buildings, requisite for the purposes of the commission, all of which will revert to the state when no longer required for their original objects.[Footnote 118]

[Footnote 118: This property, besides some on Staten Island,
consists of one hundred and eight acres of land with water
rights, etc., on Ward's Island, in the East River, upon which
the commissioners have built very spacious and substantial
structures, such as five hospitals capable of accommodating
eight hundred patients; four houses of refuge for destitute
males and females; a nursery, lunatic asylum, and two
chapels, besides a number of residences for the officers of
these institutions, out-offices, etc.--_See Commissioners'
Report_, 1868.]

But this is not the only direct pecuniary advantage which we derive from immigration. In 1856 it was ascertained that the average cash means of every person landing at Castle Garden was about sixty-eight dollars, a sum which, considering the improved condition of those who have since arrived, must amount to much more _per capita_, still, taking the standard of that year, we find that in twenty-one years over three hundred and twenty millions of dollars have been brought to the country and put into direct circulation. Its effect on our shipping interest will be appreciated when we learn that during 1867 there were engaged in the passenger business alone, at this port, two hundred and forty-five sailing vessels and four hundred and four steamships, requiring large investments of capital and employing thousands of men.

It would be impossible to estimate the indirect stimulus given to the general interests of the Union by the acquisition of so much skilled labor and brawny muscle. We can see its developments, however, in the rapid rise of our towns and cities, the superior condition of arts and manufactures, and the extraordinary increase of our agricultural productions. Coming from so many lands, each heretofore celebrated for some peculiar excellence, the European artisan, while he does not necessarily excel his American fellow-workmen in the aggregate, contributes his special knowledge to the general stock of industrial information. The Swede brings his knowledge of metallurgy, the Englishman of woolens, the Italian of silk; the German, of grape culture, and the Frenchman, of those finer fabrics and arts of design for which his country has been so long famous. When the ancient Grecian sculptor designed to make a representation of the human form in all its perfection, he selected, it is said, six beautiful living models, copying from each some member more perfect than the rest, and thus, by the combination of several excellences, modelled a perfect and harmonious whole, in which were combined grace, beauty, and harmony. So the republic, availing itself of the genius and skill which every country sends us so superabundantly, may attain that general superiority in the arts of peace which was formerly divided among many nations.

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