“I 'm not flattering you a bit. 'T is your own mother you take after; you might put her down in the bleakest spot of Ireland, and 't is a garden she 'd make it. Let her stop for shelter in a cabin, and before the shower was over you 'd not know the place. It would be all swept and clean, and the dishes ranged neatly on the dresser; and the pig she could n't abide a pig turned out, and the hens driven into the cowshed, and the children's faces washed, and their hair combed, and, maybe, the little gossoon of five years old upon her knee, saying his 'Hail, Mary,' or his 'A B C,' while she was teaching his mother how to wind the thread off the wheel; for she could spin a hank of yarn as well as any cottier's wife in the townland. The kind creature she was! But she never had a taste for real diversion; it always made her low-spirited and sad.” “Perhaps the pleasures you speak of were too dearly purchased, papa,” said Nelly. “Indeed, maybe they were,” said he, dubiously, and as though the thought had now occurred for the first time; “and, now that you say it, I begin to believe it was that same that might have fretted her. The way she was brought up made her think so, too. That brother was always talking about wastefulness, and extravagance, and so on; and, if it was in her nature, he 'd have made her as stingy as himself; and look what it comes to after all. We spent it when we had it, the Daltons are a good warrant for that; and there was he grubbing and grabbing all his days, to leave it after him to a rich man, that does n't know whether he has so many thousands more or not.” Nelly made no reply, not wishing to encourage, by the slightest apparent interest, the continuance on the theme which invariably suggested her father's gloomiest reveries. “Is that her trunk, Nelly?” said Dalton, breaking silence after a long interval, and pointing to an old and journey-worn valise that lay half-open upon the floor. “Yes, papa,” said Nelly, with a sigh. “Why, it's a mean-looking, scrubby bit of a thing; sure it 's not the size of a good tea-chest,” said he, angrily. “And yet too roomy for all its contents, papa. Poor Kate's wardrobe is a very humble one.” “I 'd like to know where 's the shops here; where 's the milliners and the haberdashers? Are we in College Green or Grafton Street, that we can just send out and have everything at our hand's turn? 'T is n't on myself I spend the money. Look at these gaiters; they 're nine years old next March; and the coat on my back was made by Peter Stevens, that 's in his grave now. The greatest enemy ever I had could not face me down that I only took care of myself. If that was my way would I be here now? See the rag I 'm wearing round my throat, a piece of old worsted like a rug a thing--” He stopped, and stammered, and then was silent altogether, for he suddenly remembered it was Nelly herself who had worked the article in question.