Ere he could utter another word the holy visitant disappeared, in a real passion at Shamus’s qualified curse; and at the same moment his confused senses recognised the voice of his wife, sending up from her straw pallet the cries that betoken a mother’s distant travail. Exchaning a few words with her, he hurried away. professedly call up, at her cabin window, an old crane who sometimes attended the very poorest women in Nance Dempsey’s situation. “Hurry to her, Noreen, acuishla, and do the best it’s the will of God to let you do. And tell her from me, Noreen--” He stopped, drawing in his lip, and clutching his cudgel hard. “Shamus, what ails you, avick?” asked old Noreen; “what ails you, to make the tears run down in the gray o’ the morning?” “Tell her from me,” continued Shamus, “that it’s from the bottom o’ the heart I’ll pray, morning and evening, and fresh and fasting, maybe, to give her a good time of it; and to show her a face on the poor child that’s coming, likelier than the two that God sent afore it. And that I’ll be thinking o’ picturing it to my own mind, though I’ll never see it far away.” “Musha, Shamus, what are you speaking of?” “No Matter, Noreen, only God be wid you, and wid her, and wid the weenocks; and tell her what I bid you. More-be-token, tell her that poor Shamus quits her in her throuble wid more love from the heart out than he had for her the first day we came together; and I’ll come back to her at any rate, sooner or later, richer or poorer, or as bare as I went; and maybe not so bare either. But God only knows. The top o’ the morning to you, Noreen, and don’t let her want the mouthful o’ praties while I’m on my thravels. For this,” added Shamus, as he bounded off, to the consternation of old Noreen--“this is the very morning and the very minute that, if I mind the dhrame at all at all, I ought to mind it; ay, without ever turning back to get a look from her, that ’ud kill the heart in my body entirely.” Without much previous knowledge of the road he was to take, Shamus walked and begged his way along the coast to the town where he might hope to embark for England. Here the captain of a merchantman agreed to let him work his passage to Bristol, whence he again walked and begged into London.