Of her past history other than police court I know nothing. I never inquired of her, preferring always to shut it out, and to fix her mind and hopes on the future. She was intelligent, and fairly well educated, but where she came from and where her friends lived she never told us. Neither did we seek to win her from the Roman Catholic faith, and a card hanging at the head of her bed told us that while dying she had been ministered to by a priest of her own Church. She was a generous soul, coarse and wild though she had become. It was her generosity that led her to leave us. She had premonitions of the coming end, and wished to put us to no trouble or expense, and doubtless her heart went back to the faith of her youth and happier days. And so she passed from us, but not from our memory, for of none that we have known and cared for have we such kindly recollections as we have of the wild Irishwoman Susan Hurley. But we have had women living with us whose presence did not conduce to our happiness, but rather to anxiety, not unmingled with fear, for whose departure we fervently hoped and hoped for a long time in vain, for we have never said ‘Begone!’ to the worst of them. A frightful tragedy is compressed into the life of any man or woman who earnestly and sincerely strives to do right and yet is impelled by some strange inward power--a power that they never understand--to do absolutely wrong. Bordering for years on the verge of insanity, they form a more dangerous class and an infinitely more pitiful spectacle than those altogether mad. Clever, generous, and high-spirited, they are subject to fits of depression, unjust suspicions and violent paroxysms of rage, and woe be to anyone that offends them! When the period of unrest comes upon such, the least drop of alcohol sends them raging mad, and they become possessed of the ferocity of tigers.