undying affection; for such nonsense was beyond their years, and schools were above their opportunities. But leave we Paddy to establish himself in his new home, while we return to the O’Briens. Sorrow a bit of difference they soon found, did Paddy’s absence make in the consumption of food. The potatoes were as extensively devoured as ever, and little Paddy’s hand-turns were much missed. His bright face gone left a blank which nothing seemed to fill; though Mrs. O’Brien, blessings on her, as far as enumeration went, soon made up the same tale that there was before Paddy’s extradition. There was a half thought in the father’s mind of christening the new comer Paddy also, since the removal of his favorite boy was like death to him; and he really began to feel as if names would run short if the wearers were not duplicated. This notion, however, was over-ruled by the bright face of Pat himself, who came at the first opportunity to bid the new brother good-morning. “Which of the childer is that wid you, Paddy?” said his mother, who had removed with her knitting to the bed in the dark corner. “Sure it’s none of our childer at all,” said Paddy, while Norah blushed for the first time in her life, and both had the first glimpse of a new revelation. “It’s only the master’s Norah. I thought may be, the walk would be lonely.” Mrs. O’Brien looked on the consequences of her own fear of loneliness—consequences which had multiplied around her, till an hour’s solitude, asleep or awake, had become one of the never-to-return joys which the song sings of. She had a prophetic dream of a similar destiny for Paddy and Norah, but said nothing to put precocious notions into children’s heads. Ellen did not half like her brother’s bringing a stranger home with him—and she would have let Norah perceive her displeasure, but her heart was too kind to do any body a willing disservice. Norah was soon put at ease—almost. But the double visit was not repeated till long afterward. Meanwhile Norah and Paddy were “set to thinking.” That visit, made in the innocence of their hearts robbed those hearts of a portion of that innocence. Before, they had been as a new brother and sister—now as they grew in years constraint increased between them. At last, resolved upon what he called a better understanding, Paddy forced Norah to confess in words what he might easily have taken for granted. And they pledged themselves, young as they were, to a life of privation, and the same chance of more mouths than food, which had been Paddy’s own idea of a household ever since he could remember—his experience in the new home excepted.