“I have but to tell you that it was in that dreary month of November, when plague and famine came together upon us, that he saw this country; the people dying on every side, the land until led, the very crops in some places uncut, terror and dismay on every side, and they who alone could have inspired confidence, or afforded aid, gone! Even Cro' Martin was deserted,--worse than deserted; for one was left to struggle alone against difficulties that the boldest and the bravest might have shrunk from. Had Barry Martin been like any other man, he would at once have placed himself at her side. It was a glorious occasion to have shown her that she was not the lone and friendless orphan, but the loved and cherished child of a doting father. But the hard, stern nature of the man had other and very different impulses; and though he tracked her from cottage to cottage, followed her in her lonely rambles, and watched her in her daily duties, no impulse of affection ever moved him to call her his daughter and bring her home to his heart. I know not whether it was to afford him these occasions of meeting her, or really in a spirit of benevolence, but he dispensed large sums in acts of charity among the people, and Mary herself recounted to me, with tears of delight in her eyes, the splendid generosity of this unknown stranger. I must hasten on. An accident, the mere circumstance of a note-book dropped by some strange chance in Barry's room, revealed to him the whole story of Captain Martin's spendthrift life; he saw that this young man had squandered away not only immense sums obtained by loans, but actually bartered his own reversionary right to the entire estate for money already lost at the gaming-table.