Five years passed on in this way, and at last little Mary was born. She was a delicate fairy thing, with that look, even from the first, in her blue eyes, which is seldom seen, except where the shadow of the grave darkens the cradle. She was fond of her father, and of Richard, and of myself, and would laugh and crow when she saw us, but the love in the core of her heart was for her mother. No matter how tired, or sleepy, or cross the baby might be, one word from her would set the bright eyes dancing, and the little rosy month smiling, and the tiny limbs quivering, as if walking or running couldn’t content her, but she must fly to her mother’s arms. And how that mother doted on the very ground she trod! I often thought that the Queen in her state carriage, with her son, God bless him! alongside of her, dressed out in gold and jewels, was not one bit happier than my mother, when she sat under the shade of the mountain ash, near the door, in the hush of the summer’s evening, singing and cronauning her only one to sleep in her arms. In the month of October, 1845, Mary was four years old. That was the bitter time, when first the food of the earth was turned to poison; when the gardens that used to be so bright and sweet, covered with the purple and white potato blossoms, became in one night black and offensive, as if fire had come down from heaven to burn them up. ’Twas a heart-breaking thing to see the laboring men, the crathurs! that had only the one half-acre to feed their little families, going out, after work, in the evenings to dig their suppers from under the black stalks. Spadeful after spadeful would be turned up, and a long piece of a ridge dug through, before they’d get a small kish full of such withered crohauneens,[H] as other years would be hardly counted fit for the pigs.
It was some time before the distress reached us, for there was a trifle of money in the savings’ bank, that held us in meal, while the neighbors were next door to starvation. As long as my father and mother had it, they shared it freely with them that were worse off than themselves; but at last the little penny of money was all spent, the price of flour was raised; and, to make matters worse, the farmer that my father worked for, at a poor eight-pence a day, was forced to send him and three more of his laborers away, as he couldn’t afford to pay them even that any longer. Oh! ’twas a sorrowful night when my father brought home the news. I remember, as well as if I saw it yesterday, the desolate look in his face when he sat down by the ashes of the turf fire that had just baked a yellow meal cake for his supper. My mother was at the opposite side, giving little Mary a drink of sour milk out of her little wooden piggin, and the child didn’t like it, being delicate and always used to sweet milk, so she said:
“Mammy, won’t you give me some of the nice milk instead of that?”
“I haven’t it asthore, nor can’t get it,” said her mother, “so don’t ye fret.”
Not a word more out of the little one’s mouth, only she turned her little cheek in toward her mother, and staid quite quiet, as if she was hearkening to what was going on.
“Judy,” said my father, “God is good, and sure ’tis only in Him we must put our trust; for in the wide world I can see nothing but starvation before us.”
“God is good, Tim,” replied my mother; “He won’t forsake us.”
Just then Richard came in with a more joyful face than I had seen on him for many a day.
“Good news!” says he, “good news, father! there’s work for us both on the Droumcarra road. The government works are to begin there to-morrow; you’ll get eight-pence a day, and I’ll get six-pence.”
If you saw our delight when we heard this, you’d think ’twas the free present of a thousand pounds that came to us, falling through the roof, instead of an offer of small wages for hard work.