It was a sad thing to part with Paddy. But necessity knows no law, and he was apprenticed to a farmer with more land and fewer children than Patrick O’Brien. And it was no less sore to Paddy to leave the homestead, than for his brothers and sisters and father and mother to give up the “moral of his father.” Those whose hearts are not united by a community in privation, and whose easy lives present no exigencies in which they are compelled to feel with and for each other, can separate without tears, and be re-united without emotion. But the few miles of distance which were now to be placed between little Paddy and the cot where he was born, seemed to him almost an unbounded desert; and the going away from home, though for so small a journey, was equivalent to banishment. He took a sorrowful review of all the familiar objects which had been his companions from his birth. There was not a scratch on the cabin walls that did not seem to him as a brother; not a mud-hole around the premises that was not as an old familiar friend. But he manfully tore himself from all; and it was with no little sensation of independence that he felt that henceforth he was really to earn his own living, and to eat bread which should not diminish the breakfasts of the rest. There were other circumstances too, as yet undeveloped, which aided him in becoming reconciled. The inmates of the new home were not strange to little Paddy, and one of them, in especial, he had a childish weakness and fondness for. It is not our intention to say that Paddy and little Norah knew any thing about what boarding-school misses call undying affection; for such nonsense was beyond their years, and schools were above their opportunities. But leave we Paddy to establish himself in his new home, while we return to the O’Briens.

Sorrow a bit of difference they soon found, did Paddy’s absence make in the consumption of food. The potatoes were as extensively devoured as ever, and little Paddy’s hand-turns were much missed. His bright face gone left a blank which nothing seemed to fill; though Mrs. O’Brien, blessings on her, as far as enumeration went, soon made up the same tale that there was before Paddy’s extradition. There was a half thought in the father’s mind of christening the new comer Paddy also, since the removal of his favorite boy was like death to him; and he really began to feel as if names would run short if the wearers were not duplicated. This notion, however, was over-ruled by the bright face of Pat himself, who came at the first opportunity to bid the new brother good-morning.

“Which of the childer is that wid you, Paddy?” said his mother, who had removed with her knitting to the bed in the dark corner.

“Sure it’s none of our childer at all,” said Paddy, while Norah blushed for the first time in her life, and both had the first glimpse of a new revelation. “It’s only the master’s Norah. I thought may be, the walk would be lonely.”

Mrs. O’Brien looked on the consequences of her own fear of loneliness—consequences which had multiplied around her, till an hour’s solitude, asleep or awake, had become one of the never-to-return joys which the song sings of. She had a prophetic dream of a similar destiny for Paddy and Norah, but said nothing to put precocious notions into children’s heads. Ellen did not half like her brother’s bringing a stranger home with him—and she would have let Norah perceive her displeasure, but her heart was too kind to do any body a willing disservice. Norah was soon put at ease—almost. But the double visit was not repeated till long afterward. Meanwhile Norah and Paddy were “set to thinking.” That visit, made in the innocence of their hearts robbed those hearts of a portion of that innocence. Before, they had been as a new brother and sister—now as they grew in years constraint increased between them. At last, resolved upon what he called a better understanding, Paddy forced Norah to confess in words what he might easily have taken for granted. And they pledged themselves, young as they were, to a life of privation, and the same chance of more mouths than food, which had been Paddy’s own idea of a household ever since he could remember—his experience in the new home excepted.

Paddy went home one evening without Norah, fully resolved to divulge what he had determined on, in set words—a labor he might have saved himself, for it was all guessed long before. His time was out now in a few months, and he had resolved, as soon as one bondage was concluded to enter into another. In the years that he had been away, he had visited home too often to be surprised at the changes which had taken place. Ellen looked old—she seemed the mother of her brothers and sisters, for care fast brings the marks of years. And the mother, tall, gaunt and thin, looked as if she might have been the grand-parent of the children around her. Patrick senior was better saved, but time showed its marks on him too; and those not light ones. He was more peevish than formerly; he retained the same black pipe longer in service, and kept it, too, in use more constantly, for there was scarce an hour of the day when its fragrance was not issuing. And as strong tobacco is too apt to require strong accompaniments, we are compelled to acknowledge that Patrick O’Brien was contracting a taste for less harmless potations than buttermilk.

Poor and content is rich. Poor and discontented is poor indeed. Ellen felt the infection of unhappiness, and the very children seemed to have grown miserable. Squalor and negligence had marked the whole household, and Paddy had learned to make his visits unpleasant performances of duty, instead of the hilarious occasions that they once were. It was no wonder that he preferred a quiet evening in his second home, where he could sit and watch Norah’s busy fingers, rather than a visit to his own father’s house; for there cracked and dissonant voices jarred harshly, children cried, and the welcome which he once met had changed to the utterance of mutual complaints, and perhaps to unsuspended jarrings among those whom he loved.

There seemed a spell on the place. Ellen said—“Sure there’s no luck here any more.” And a neighbor, who had a son over sea, put a new thought in her head. Ellen was often desired to act as amanuensis to answer his letters. If her epistles were not clerkly they were written as dictated, and it may be shrewdly suspected that the person to whom they were written liked them none the less, that he detected the handwriting, though they were signed, “your affectionate mother.” Such a paradise as American letters revealed to her, could not fail to make her own discomforts worse by contrast. But the paradise was to her for a long time a thing unhoped for, unthought of. At last a new resolution occurred to her.

“Sure, mother,” she said one day, “we’d better be in Ameriky.”

The mother smiled at the impossibility. But Ellen had set her heart on it. She was the prop of the house—the only one in it, indeed, who had any strength or determination left. Need we say she carried her point? She reasoned father and mother into the desirableness of the change, and they could but acknowledge that any thing would be preferable to their present situation. The correspondence to which she had access furnished her with arguments, and the will once found for the enterprise, the way presented no longer insuperable obstacles. All had been discussed, and the journey was fully determined upon, when Paddy reached the cottage with his plans in his head—selfish plans, Ellen afterward said they were.

“Sure,” cried she as he entered, “here’s Patrick, too, will go with us.”

“To be sure I will—where?” answered Paddy, delighted once more to find his home cheerful.

“To Ameriky, Patrick,” said his father, taking the pipe from his mouth to watch his son’s face. The son looked sad, astonished, and bewildered. It was all new to him, and he could make no reply, save to repeat—

“A-mer-iky!”

“To be sure,” said Ellen. “What’ll we wait here for, doing no good at all? There’s Phelim may be president, and Mike a djuke, and Terrence a parliament man, and Bridget may marry a lord, and—”

“And Ellen?” inquired Patrick, with a quizzical look, which contrasted curiously with his wo-begone expression.

“Sure the best of the land will be hers,” said her mother. “Hasn’t she been the born slave of the whole of ye’s? She didn’t go away from her mother’s side, not she, for betther board and keeping!”

“Mother!” expostulated Paddy.

“More she didn’t,” continued the mother, vexed at her son’s cool reception of their good news as she deemed it. “She didn’t find new young mates, and forget the mother that bore her!”

“Mother!” said Patrick, “ye sent me away, ye know ye did. Sure I’d not gone to the Queen’s palace asself, but ye sent me away, so you did.”

“Thrue for you, Patrick!” said Ellen, breaking in to keep the peace. “Thrue for you; and more be token of that we’ll welcome you back again. Your service is up, come Easter, and then we’ll all cross the wide sea together!”

Poor Patrick! All the various modes in which he had conned over his intended communication were put to flight in a moment. This was no time to speak of any such proposals—for with half an eye to such a contingency, Patrick knew his mother had spoken. Never had the way back seemed so long to Patrick as it did that night. He had committed himself by no engagement to go with his family to the new land over sea; but he saw that they all chose to take his going for granted. The children supposed it of course, thinking of nothing else; and the elders deemed it the best way to admit no question. Norah listened in vain that night for Paddy’s cheerful whistle as he neared the house. She wondered, and fell asleep. But there was no sleep for Patrick.

Norah was too diffident to ask Patrick how he sped the next day—but didn’t she burn to know! At length, and with a very sad face, he told her all except his mother’s covert and undeserved reproaches. Norah listened with a tear in her eye, for she could not dissemble. She did not interrupt him, and when he ceased, she said:

“Sure you’ll go with them, Patrick, dear!”

“Sure I’ll do no such thing, Norah, darling!” And he hugged her to his heart with a suddenness which she could not foresee, and an energy she could not resist, had she wished it.

——