On the morning of the last day he ever intended to spend in the shed, at eleven o'clock he hoard the sounds of horses' feet passing along the road, The circumstance was one quite familiar to him; but these horsemen, whoever they might be, stopped, and immediately after, two respectable looking men, dressed in black, approached him. His forlorn state and frightfully wasted appearance startled them, and the younger of the two asked, in a tone of voice which went directly to his heart, how it was that they found him in a situation so desolate.
The kind interest implied by the words, and probably a sense of his utterly destitute state, affected him strongly, and he burst into tears. The strangers looked at each other, then at him; and if looks could express sympathy, theirs expressed it.
“My good boy,” said the first, “how is it that we find you in a situation so deplorable and wretched as this? Who are you, or why is it that you have not a friendly roof I to shelter you?”
“I'm a poor scholar,” replied Jemmy, “the son of honest but reduced parents: I came to this part of the country with the intention of preparing myself for Maynooth and, if it might plase God, with the hope of being able to raise them out of their distress.”
The strangers looked more earnestly at the boy; sickness had touched his fine intellectual features into a purity of expression almost ethereal. His fair skin appeared nearly transparent, and the light of truth and candor lit up his countenance with a lustre which affliction could not dim.
The other stranger approached him more nearly, stooped for a moment, and felt his pulse.
“How long have you been in this country?” he inquired.
“Nearly three years.”
“You have been ill of the fever which is so prevalent; how did you come to be left to the chance of perishing upon the highway?”
“Why, sir, the people were afeard to let me into their houses in consequence of the faver. I got ill in school, sir, but no boy would venture to bring me home, an' the master turned me out, to die, I believe. May God forgive him!”