heart;--whether I lie abroad or at home I'm always tossing about in a bed of prushaugh vooe, wid the baggonet glimmering like a flash of lightning over mee head: so you'll deliver me up at once, that I may suffer by man for raising mee hand against man, and God help me to go through it!” And, no doubt, the sight he saw was enough to make him do as he did. A week after he tould his wife his whole history; and how, when he wint out that day when he came home and called for the priest, after walking a little way along the road, thinking of no harm in the world, but with his heart weighed down as usual for the deed he'd done long ago, he was suddenly startled, by hearing somebody singing what he thought was a keentaghaun; and what should he see, on turning his eyes to the bit of wild broken ground by the road-side, but the face of his ould mother! And what was she doing, think you, but tearing up the wild turnip-plants, which were growing on the spot where she stood, as though her life depended on their destruction!--He thought she'd been in her grave years and years before; but there she was, miserably ould, and withered away to skin and bone: but though altered by time, he saw, at the first look, it was his mother. She wint on with her work, not noticing her son, and singing in a low, wild, heart-breaking tone-- “Still the prushaugh vooe grows! For the winds are his foes, And scatter the seed, Of the fearful weed, O'er mountain and moor; While weary and sore, I travel, up-rooting Each bright green shooting:-- But the winds are his foes, And the prushaugh still grows! Oh! mee llanuv! mee lanuv!” And says she, “Mee task will never be ended; for mee tears water the seeds, while I pull up the ould plants that bore them. Oh! Johnny! where are you, my son?--Come to your mother and help her, my darling!” So then he staggered up to her, but she didn't know him!--the mother didn't know the son she doated on,--but cursed him, and called him “Dick Blaney,” and “Hearthmoneyman!”--All this it was that drove Johnny O'Rourke to run home, like one out of his senses, and make his confession. It's said, that he tried, at the bar, with tears and lamentation, which wasn't expected of him, to save his life; or, at any rate, to get a long day given him:--promising how good he'd be, if he was let live, and pleading the years he'd passed in repentance. But you'd guess, if I did'nt tell you, that such blarney, from one who'd done as he had, would have no weight. So he suffered; and that, too, penitently, as I'm tould by them that saw him at the last. His wife spent all she could scrape together,--as he bid her with his last words a'most,--in search of his mother; but the ould woman never was found, as far as I know, from that day to this; and, may be, the poor soul is still wandering about, tearing up the prushaugh vooe, and singing her melancholy song. [Illustration: 241] ME AND MY GHOST-SHIP.