ORNY was a disappointed man. When he came over from Ireland, he thought he was coming to El Dorado. Not that he had ever heard of such a place as El Dorado, but he had heard wonderful stories rehearsed by his kinsfolk and neighbors, and he imagined that our rivers were milk, and our lakes honey; that gold was to be had for the asking, and silver was nothing accounted of in "Ameriky." So Corny kissed his father and mother, took his brown-haired, bright-eyed young wife, his pipe, and his flute, and sailed over to the Land of Promise. He found that it promised more than it performed; or rather Irish lips had reported and Irish ears heard more than was ever spoken. The soil of Columbia, like the soil of green Erin, is coy to cold suitors. Fortune here, as fortune there, will be wooed, and not unsought be won; and the long and the short of it was, that Corny, instead of measuring out gold dollars by the sieveful, had

to take his hod and hoe and go to work like the rest of us. Is it any wonder that he was disappointed? Who would not be disappointed to make a seajourney and a land-journey of three thousand miles, leaving father and mother and mother-land behind, and at the end of it find a shovel ? It was as if, tired of the toil and turmoil of this work-a-day world, you should take up your pilgrim-staff some fine evening, and travel on to the turreted castle that rises royally in yonder sunset sky, a castle whose walls are amethyst and its portals pearl, which seemed to beckon you on to eternal ambrosia and nectar, to promise nothing less than that you should be served by Hebes, and companioned by gods; and after weeks of weary wandering, footsore and forlorn, you reach your sunset castle, and find that you will not be invited to so much as a supper of Johnny-cake and milk till you shall have baked the Johnnycake and milked the cow.

But Corny put the best face on the matter, and the best hand too, which in fact amounts to pretty much the same thing, and went to work. Indeed, there was nothing else for him to do. He had spent all his money in coming over, and in America, as everywhere else, must either work or die. He was a sturdy lad of fields and pastures, so he went into the country and mowed great swaths through the waving valleys, and hoed straight rows through the brown corn-lands, and smote the

threshing-floors with regular, strong beats, and pressed the sweet, rich, foaming cider into the scented vats. In winter he helped to gather in abundant crops of solid, steely ice to cool the sherbet of sultanas, or he drove his large-limbed, steaming oxen over the frozen roads into the silent woods, and made the country-side ring with the stroke of his sturdy axe. So, many a board was crowned and many a hearth-stone warmed by the willing hand of this swart, hale, hearty Irish exile.

All this while bright-eyed Kathleen kept everything snug and nice in the two rooms of their little cottage, her own self the snuggest and nicest thing in it, and that Corny knew right well. To this little cottage there presently came a great joy and a great sorrow, a great joy of hope and anticipation, a great sorrow of disappointment for a little girl "that was dead before she was born"; and then another joy of hope and anticipation, and another sorrow of deep disappointment for a little boy that was but a few seconds a baby before he was an angel; and yet a third time hope budded and bloomed, yes, thank God! bloomed into a big, burly, scowling, healthy baby, hideous to the unprejudiced eye, but handsome as babies go; and he clenched his fist and vowed in baby fashion to live as long as Methuselah. And they called his name Corny. Then in all the land was nobody so happy as Corny and Kathleen. Corny the Great

worked all day long, and then came home and fluted to Corny the Less, and Kathleen washed and scrubbed and scolded, and said the baby was cross, and such a trouble she could n't do any work, laughing in her heart the while for pure delight, and would have torn your tongue out if you had asserted or even assented that the baby was the least bit cross or troublesome.

But strange to say, Corny, who had borne his disappointment bravely before, now that he was drinking down great draughts of fatherly joy began to grow discontented. There came over him a mighty yearning for the Old Country. I think he wanted to show his foreign-born baby to his Cork county friends, and perhaps this new paternal love in his heart revived and strengthened the old filial love. Just now, too, letters came from the Irish homestead. His old mother declared that she believed she should live twenty years longer if she could see his face once more. His old father made generous Irish proffers of unlimited peat, perpetual house rent, and probable inheritance; and Corny hung up his scythe and threw down his hoe, and said he would go. Then he and Kathleen talked it over; and Kathleen did not care for the peat nor the house rent, and not over much, I am afraid, for the father and mother whom she scarcely knew. She only saw a long, tiresome, and dangerous voyage for the prince in the cradle, and she rocked him with an emphatic foot, and

made no scruple of letting it be known that she had a very contemptuous opinion of migration, and still Corny said he would go. Then there came stories of destitution, distress, and impending famine in sorrow-stricken Ireland, and Kathleen saw a horrid vision, —a pair of quivering jelly cheeks growing thin, and sharp, and still; dimples flattening out of little hands, creases straightening out of little legs; and what 'll the boy do for milk on shipboard? asks Kathleen Avourneen, a slight savor of acid in her honest, ringing voice.

"Sure, an' he'll drink tay now like an ould woman,' answers Corny; and the more lions ramp and roar in his path, the more he determines to go, and gives notice accordingly to his landlord. "The whole world cannot stop me from going," says Corny O'Curran.

But away off in the northwestern corner of this country, terrible things were happening, children torn from their mother's arms and beaten to death against rocks, husbands shot down in their wheat-fields, wives at their cottage-doors, and blood and rapine and the wild war-whoop scattering horror and dismay. Men left their mown grass in the fields, their oxen standing by the nebs, the cake smoking on the hearth, and fled for life, for love, by day, by night, through the woods, for the nearest forts and towns of refuge. One father and mother deserted their log-house just built, their rich lands just tilled, all their past toil and hope of