NORA cried out: "'Tis so pretty to-day!" The barefooted children were threading the slopes of Howth towards Raheny. Far-off, the city, with its lights and stretches of glorified evening water, was lying there lovely enough between the mountains and the sea. It was Nora's tenth birthday, and, to please her, they had been on the march all afternoon, their arms full of rock-born speedwell and primrose. "'Tis so pretty!" echoed little Winny, with enthusiasm. But the boy looked abroad without a smile. "'T'd be prettier when things is right," he answered severely. Hughey was a man of culture; but his speech was the soft slipshod of the south. The three trudged on in silence, for Hughey was a personage to his small sisters; and Hughey in a mood was to be respected. He, alas, had been in a mood too long. He had carried Winny over the roughest places, and shown her Ireland's Eye, and, alongshore, the fishing-nets and trawls; he had given his one biscuit to be shared between them all; and lying in the velvet sward by the Druid stone, he had told them all he knew of the fairy-folk in their raths, for the seventieth time. But he was full of sad and bitter brooding the while, thinking of his mother, his poor mother, his precious mother, working too hard at home, for whom there never seemed to be any birthdays or out-of-door pleasures. Hugh was nearly twelve now, and mature as the eldest child must always be among the poor. He could remember times in the county Wexford, before his father, who was of kin to half the gentry in the countryside, died; times when life had a very different outlook, and when his peasant mother, with short skirts and her sleeves rolled up, would go gayly between her great stone-flagged kitchen and the well or the turkey-hen's nest under the blackthorn hedge, singing, singing, like a lark. They had to leave that pleasant farm, and the thatched roof which had sheltered them from their fate, and move up to cloudier Dublin, to a stifling garret over a beer-shop; and it was a miserable change. Malachi O'Kinsella, the cheerful thriftless man, with his handsome bearing and his superfluous oratory, was gone; and his Hughey was too young to be of service to those he left behind. A fine monument, with _Glory be to God_ on it, had to be put up over him in the old churchyard, two years ago; and there had been since the problem of schooling, feeding, and clothing Hughey, Nora, and Winny. Then Rose, three years old, fell into a lime-kiln, and was associated with the enforced luxury of a second funeral; and Dan, the baby, born after his father's death, was sickly, and therefore costly too; and now the rent had to be paid, and the morrow thought of, on just nothing a week! All of which this Hugh, with his acumen and quick sympathy, had found out. He worshipped his mother, in his shy, abstinent Irish way; his heart was bursting for her sake, though he but half knew it, with a sense of the mystery and wrong-headedness of human society.