neighbors, starve to death. He could remember
looking at the stiffened figure of a woman stretched
on the stones by the roadside, with the green stain
of nettles on her white lips. A girl five years or
so older than himself, also a Madden and distantly
related, had started in despair off across the moun-
tains to the town where it was said the poor-law
officers were dealing out food. He could recall
her coming back next day, wild-eyed with hunger
and the fever; the officers had refused her relief
because her bare legs were not wholly shrunken to
the bone. "While there's a calf on the shank,
there's no starvation," they had explained to her.
The girl died without profiting by this official
apothegm. The boy found it burned ineffaceably
upon his brain. Now, after a lapse of more than
forty years, it seemed the thing that he remem-
bered best about Ireland.

He had drifted westward as an unconsidered,
unresisting item in that vast flight of the famine
years. Others whom he rubbed against in that
melancholy exodus, and deemed of much greater
promise than himself, had done badly. Somehow
he did well. He learned the wheelwright's trade,
and really that seemed all there was to tell. The
rest had been calm and sequent progression, --
steady employment as a journeyman first; then
marriage and a house and lot; the modest start
as a master; the move to Octavius and cheap
lumber; the growth of his business, always marked

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