“Obey me on mee death-bed, if you never did before. I'd linger long in agonies iv you didn't; and, may be, die shrieking, just as they came to take you up!--Go off, my darling boy, and I'll expire in peace, wid the hope of your escaping. Soul and body I'll try to hould together until morning; and then, iv I don't hear of your being taken,--as bad news travels fast,--I'll think you're safe, and die happy.” Well, at last Johnny promised his mother he'd try all he could to get away to some place where he couldn't be known; and after taking her blessing, and an eternal lave of her,--a sorrowful one it was, they say,--he wint out at the back door of the cabin, and made off as fast as he well could. After skulking about in different parts for many months, at last he came to this place, got a wife, and did as well as here and there one;--nobody suspecting him of being worse than his neighbours,--for eighteen or twenty long years. His wife, who was a cousin of mine, loved him all that while; and said, though he was dull and gloomy at times, and didn't get his sleep for bad dreams he had,--which she thought made him cross,--take him altogether, he was as good a husband as woman could wish. Well, as I said 'while ago, Johnny O'Rourke lived among us here, for eighteen or twenty years,--under the name of Michael Walsh though, I must tell you,--then you'll hear what happened him. He wint out to fetch a bit of a walk one day, after being bad a week or two, so that he couldn't well work; but he hadn't been over the threshould a quarter of an hour, when he came running back the most lamentable-looking object that ever darkened a door. Every hair on his head seemed to have a life of its own; his eye-balls were fixed as those of one just killed with fright; his mouth was half open; his jaw seemingly motionless; his lips white as a sheet; and around them both was a blue circle, as though he'd been painted to imitate death. Down he dropped upon the floor as soon as he got in; and all his wife and the neighbours could do, didn't restore him to his right senses for hours. At last, he began to call for the priest;--I remember it as well as if it happened but yesterday;--and here it was where they found Father Killala, who was telling me the middle and both ends of the _cant_ at The Beg: for all Pierce Veogh's furniture and things were sould under the hammer that day, and the Monday before, for a mere nothing, or next kin to it. And when Father Killala got to the sick man, he said, that though we'd so long called him Mick Walsh, his raal name was Johnny O'Rourke; and that he'd seen a sight that day, which drove him to do what he'd long been thinking of; namely,--confessing that he was the murderer of Big Dick Blaney, the Hearthmoneyman, who was found, with an ould baggonet in his breast, among the prushaugh vooe by the road side, away up the country, twenty years before. “And,” says he, “I can't live wid the load on mee