The women proffered consolation, and raised her red head from where it lay beside the butter. Swaying and lolling, she was propped against their shoulders, with the light full on her convulsed face, and the whole party crushed forth into the kitchen. There was some delay, while a plate, with a heap of silver upon it, was taken from a table outside the door of the house and handed over to the priest, and many faces peered in a circle round the counting of the money. There was more than eight pounds, subscribed in silver and two half-sovereigns by the visitors to the funeral, as payment to the priest for masses for the soul of the deceased. It is an institution known as “the altar,” and happily combines a politeness to the dead man and his family, with a keen sense of the return that will be made in kind when it becomes the donor’s turn to have a funeral. The sight of the gold was balm to the dazed spirit of the Widow Quin. “Thank God, they showed that much respect for him,” she said, as congratulations were passed round. “’Twas a great althar.” A windy sunset of January was set forth that afternoon in cold orange and green behind the bogs near Tully Lake. The new railway line ran across them, away in the north-west, and the rails gleamed along a track that seemed to end against the breast of the evening sky. Coming from the east, the line emerged from a cutting in a wooded hill, where blocks of stone, overturned trucks, and stumps of trees with twisted, agonized roots, littered the yellow sand. The wood ran to the lips of the cutting on either side, and the strong fir-trees on the height could look down the tawny slants upon their fallen comrades. Standing below, the jaws of the ugly cleft let in the winter sunset and the twin glitter of the rails, while above, the fir-trees strove against the evening wind. It was worth remaining still to look at, in spite of the cold, and Mr. Wilfrid Glasgow, with two long account-books under his arm, and the peak of his cap over his eyes, stood for at least a minute surveying alternately his own handiwork and that of his Creator. He felt a proper admiration for both; impartially he perhaps thought that his own was more deserving of credit. At length, turning his back upon the sunset, he walked along the line to where a road crossed it. As he climbed some bars and swung himself down into the road it could be seen that he was active, with the skilled and wary activity of forty. He was tall and slight; when his hat was on, his fair thin moustache and light figure made short-sighted people place him in the early thirties.