"Well, it's all over, Jane!" he cried, coming just at dusk into the room, where she stood at the window, her back turned toward him. "Yes. Poor Will! He was a good fellow years ago--witty, hospitable. You didn't know him in his prime. Your mother liked him. That is, well--" He sat down by the fire, staring at it with his owlish eyes, pulling off his old boots and soaked coat, for it was raining hard, and wondering a little that Jane had not a warm change of clothes ready for him as usual. But she did not move. "Yes," with a groan. "He knows the great secret now, poor fellow! I wish I'd been kinder to him. There's lots of things I might have done. But that damned money! I suppose it soured me." Jane turned. "I am glad _I_ did what was right to him," she said slowly. The captain looked at her surprised. The shock had been too heavy on the child, he thought: her eyes were quite sunken in her white face. "Yes, yes. You were always a very nice, attentive little nurse. But when anybody dies one is apt to remember one's shortcomings to them, and wish for even an hour to set all right." "I have done nothing to him which I would wish to set right," she said again, her lips moving with difficulty. Her father did not answer. But she was so unused to speak of herself in any way that he observed her persistence now as peculiar. REBECCA HARDING DAVIS. [TO BE CONTINUED.] IRISH SOCIETY IN THE LAST CENTURY. Nations as well as individuals have the defects of their qualities, and the Irish race has its faults as well as its virtues; but it will be conceded on all sides that the _humdrum_ is not one of its attributes. During the eighteenth century the social state of Ireland was peculiarly anomalous. The penal laws were in full force for the most of that time. The great families, Irish or Norman--the latter having long before become _Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores_--had either conformed to the ruling faith or had betaken themselves to more friendly shores, or, having lost their estates by confiscation or treachery, had become confounded with the oppressed and suffering multitude. The Irish nation was practically divided into a "Protestant garrison" and a pariah caste. It would have been strange, therefore, if the faults incident to their position had not been developed in each of these classes. And yet when the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Pendarves visited the island in 1731 she found social life in the capital worthy of commendation. The generality of the people, she said, were much the same as in England--a mixture of good and bad. All she met behaved themselves very decently according to their rank. "Now and then," she adds, "an oddity breaks out, but none so extraordinary but that I could match them in England. There is a heartiness among them that is more like _Cornwall_ than any I have known, and great sociableness." Cornwall, it must be remembered, is largely Celtic. She writes, again,