This had all been in his day, and he did not know at all how things had changed. First, after he sailed, things had gone fairly; Winnie had grown strong again, and even when his silence grew obstinate, no shadow of doubt crossed her mind; she was so sure he loved her, and she knew he would come back some day to her. The first cloud on the sky came when the baby developed some disease of the hip, the result of the fall, and it refused to yield to all the doctor's treatment; indeed it became worse with time, and as the years slipped by, the ailing, puny babe grew into a delicate, gentle child, fair and wise and grave, but crippled hopelessly. Then, the fourth year after Jim went, there came a bad season, crops failed, and the cow died; and then, fast on those troubles, the kind old landlord died, and his place was taken by a schoolboy at Eton, and, alas! the agency of his estates placed in the hands of a certain J. P. and D. L., tales of whose evictions on the estates already under his charge had made those simple peasants shiver by their firesides in the winter evenings. Then to this peaceful mountain colony came raising of rents like a thunder-clap, followed soon by writs, and then the Sheriff and the dreadful evicting parties. And one of the first to go was old Mrs. Daly; and when she saw the little brown house whereto her young husband, dead those twenty years, had brought her as a bride, where her children were born, and from whose doors one after the other the little frail things, dead at birth, had been carried, till at last her strong, hearty Jim came--when she saw the golden thatch of it given to the flames, the honest, proud old heart broke, and from the house of a kindly neighbor, where neighbor's hands carried her gently, she also went out, a few days later, to join husband and babes in the churchyard house, whence none should seek to evict them. And the troubles thickened, and famine and fever and death came; and then the good priest died too--of a broken heart, they said. And so the last friend was gone--for the people, with pain and death shadowing every hearthstone, were overwhelmed with their own troubles--and poor Winnie and the little crippled son drifted away to the city.