which he was always willing to give. To help a man out of a scrape, to stand by a comrade in distress, to make glad a company with clean and ready wit, to resent an evil deed or to show whole-hearted appreciation of a good one, there wasn't in all Ireland a man who could out-match Ned M'Grane, the laughing, jovial, generous blacksmith of Balnagore.

[Pg 10]

One night, just a week before Shrove (no matter whether 'twas last year or the year before or ten years ago) the smithy was, for a wonder, deserted by all its usual visitors, and the smith was alone with his work and his thoughts, which latter found expression in the snatches of song he sung in the intervals between placing the piece of iron upon which he was working in the fire and the taking out of it again, to be pounded on the anvil. He was just finishing a song, the last verse of which ran like this:

"No! no! across the thundering waves the answer rings full high!

No! no! re-echoes many a heart beneath the Irish sky

The land shall wake, her exiled sons across the sea shall sail

Once more to set a coronet on queenly Grainne Mhaol."

and was giving the finishing touches to a new horse-shoe, when he heard a voice at the door say, "God bless the work," and on looking up his eyes met the[Pg 11] open, honest, handsome face of his cousin and dearest friend and comrade, Seumas Shanley of Drumberagh.

[Pg 11]

"An' you, too, a mhic o," answered Ned M'Grane, with a welcoming smile. "You're the very man I was thinkin' about a few minutes ago, an' I'm glad you're by yourself. Any change in the plan of campaign? Is Old Crusty as determined as ever?"

"Worse than ever," said Seumas Shanley, as he picked up a piece of a broken match-box from the floor, set it blazing at the forge fire, and lighted his pipe with it. "Nannie says that he got into a tearin' rage out an' out last night when she refused again to marry Jack the Jobber, an' he won't let her leave his sight for a minute. All she could do was to send me a note with old Kitty Malone to-day. Kitty was down in it, washin', an' she says Larry has his mind made up that Nannie must marry Flanagan before Shrove. I was over with Father Martin to-day."

"An' what did he say?" asked Ned M'Grane.

"He said 'twould be a cryin' shame to have a 

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