All the weary months of unkindness and neglect were forgotten, and she only remembered that her Jim was in sore trouble--Jim Daly that courted her, her husband, and her baby's father; not Jim Daly the good fellow at the public-house, always ready to take a treat or stand one; always the first in every scheme of conviviality, drowning heart and mind and conscience in cheap and bad whisky; while at home, on the little hillside farm, crops were rotting, haggard lying empty, land untilled, and poverty and hunger threatening the little home, and day after day the meek, uncomplaining young wife was growing thinner and paler, and the lines deepening in her face where no lines should be. Three years had gone by since the wedding-day that seemed but the gate of a happy future for those two young things who loved each other truly, and almost since that wedding-day Jim Daly had been going steadily downhill. Not that he was vicious at all; he was only young and gay and good-natured, and so sought after for those things, and he had a fine baritone voice that could roll out "Colleen dhas cruitheen na mo" with rare power and tenderness, and when the rare spirits who held their merry-makings in the Widow Doolan's public-house nightly would come seeking to draw him thither with many flattering words, he was not strong enough to resist the temptation; and the young wife--they were the merest boy and girl--was too gentle in her clinging love to stay him. So things had gone steadily from bad to worse, and instead of only the nights, much of the days as well were spent in the gin-shop, and at last the time came when people began to shake their heads over bonny Jim Daly as a confirmed drunkard, and the handsome boyish face was getting a sodden look, and the once frank, clear eyes refused to look at one either frankly or clearly, but shuffled from under a friend's gaze uneasily and painfully. Last night, however, the climax had come when, reeling home after midnight, the tender little wife, with her baby on her breast, had opened the door for him, and had stood in the door-way with some word of pain on her lips, and he feeling his progress barred, but with no sense of what stood there, had struck out fiercely with his great fist, and stricken wife and child to the ground. And Winnie's mouth had come with cruel force against a projecting corner of the dresser, and his hand had marked darkly her soft face, and she and the little son were both bruised and injured by the fall. We have seen how bitter poor Jim's repentance was when he came to himself out of his drunken sleep, and in presence of it his wife, womanlike, forgot everything but that he needed her utmost love and tenderness. But if she was forbearing to him out of her great love, his little brown old mother, who had been sent for hastily to her farm two miles away, spared not at all to give him what she called the rough side of her tongue; and when the doctor came from