Farmer—“An' whisper; I wish you'd offer up a prayer for the rulin' o' the tongue. The Lord might hear you, but there's no great hopes that ever he'll hear me; though I've prayed for it almost ever since I was married, night an' day, winther and summer; but no use, she's as bad as ever.”
This was said in a kind of friendly insinuating undertone to Owen; who, on hearing it, simply nodded his head, but made no other reply.
They then recommenced their journey, after having once more blessed, and been invited by their charitable entertainers, who made them promise never to pass their house without stopping a night with them.
It is not our intention to trace Owen M'Carthy and his wife through all the variety which a wandering pauper's life affords. He never could reconcile himself to the habits of a mendicant. His honest pride and integrity of heart raised him above it: neither did he sink into the whine and cant of imposture, nor the slang of knavery. No; there was a touch of manly sorrow about him, which neither time, nor familiarity with his degraded mode of life, could take away from him. His usual observation to his wife, and he never made it without a pang of intense bitterness, was—“Kathleen, dar-lin', it's thrue we have enough to ate an' to dhrink; but we have no home—no home!” to a man like him it was a thought of surpassing bitterness, indeed.
“Ah! Kathleen,” he would observe, “if we had but the poorest shed that could be built, provided it was our own, wouldn't we be happy? The bread we ate, avourneen, doesn't do us good. We don't work for it; it's the bread of shame and idleness: and yet it's Owen M'Carthy that ates it! But, avourneen, that's past; an' we'll never see our own home, or our own hearth agin. That's what's cuttin' into my heart, Kathleen. Never!—never!”
Many a trial, too, of another kind, was his patience called upon to sustain; particularly from the wealthy and the more elevated in life, when his inexperiences as a mendicant led him to solicit their assistance.
“Begone, sirrah, off my grounds!” one would say. “Why don't you work, you sturdy impostor,” another would exclaim, “rather than stroll about so lazily, training your brats to the gallows?”
“You should be taken up, fellow, as a vagrant,” a third would observe; “and if I ever catch you coming up my avenue again, depend upon it, I will slip my dogs at you and your idle spawn.”
Owen, on these occasions, turned away in silence; he did not curse them; but the pangs of his honest heart went before Him who will, sooner or later, visit upon the heads of such men their cruel spurning and neglect of the poor.
“Kathleen,” he observed to his wife, one day, about a, year or more after they had begun to beg; “Kathleen, I have been turnin' it in my mind, that some of these childhre might sthrive to earn their bit an' sup, an' their little coverin' of clo'es, poor things. We might put them to herd cows in the summer, an' the girshas to somethin' else in the farmers' house. What do you think, asthore?”