THE WOMAN WHO PAID THE POOR RATE.
This would be humorous were it not ghastly. Had she intended it as a joke it would have been a good one, but unfortunately it was no joke. The British government is not jocular. The wretched woman was actually paying a tax to support the poor! What must be the condition of the poor if such as she were paying to support them?
I was in the postoffice at Cork, when a middle-aged woman came in and received a letter. She opened it and read it, or rather read a few lines. The letter dropped to the floor, and she staggered and would have fallen but for the friendly wall against which she leaned.
“What is the matter?”
“Oh, sor, Patsey is dead—and who’ll pay the rint!”
PATSEY’S DEAD.
Here it was again! Patsey was her son, a boy of nineteen, who by the aid of an uncle who had fortunately escaped from the clutches of the British government, years ago, had been taken to America. He had found employment and had been regularly sending money to his mother to pay the rent of the miserable cabin she existed in. She had not heard from him for six weeks and had been worried about him. This letter was from his room-mate, and it conveyed the intelligence that he had been sick for six weeks, and that his sickness had terminated in death. Poor Patsey was dead and buried.
What kind of an infamy is it that will not permit a mother to mourn the death of her first born without connecting it with “rint?” This one could not, for as dearly as she loved Patsey, there were six others just as dear to her, to whom Patsey was the life. It was Patsey in America who shielded the others from starvation. What kind of an infernalism is it that grips the hearts of women, that lays its icy iron finger upon the tenderest chords in a mother’s heart?