I understand flowers, and the gentry's ready to buy them; and sure, when once the flowers are set, they'll grow of themselves while I'm doing something else. Isn't it a beautiful thing to think of that! how the Lord helps us to a great deal if we only do a little towards it !'

'How do you make that out?' inquired the net-maker.

Burnt Eagle pulled a seed-pod from a tuft of beautiful sea-pink. 'All that's wanted of us,' he said, 'is to put such as this in the earth at first, and doesn't God's goodness do all the rest?'

'But it would be "time enough," sure, to make the fence whin the ground was ready,' said his neighbour, reverting to the first part of her conversation.

'And have all the neighbours' pigs right through it the next morning?' retorted the old man, laughing; 'no, no, that's not my way, Mrs Radford.'

'Fair and aisy goes far in a day, Masther Aigle,' said the gossip, lounging against the fence, and taking her pipe out of her pocket. 'Do you want a coal for your pipe, ma'am?' inquired Burnt Eagle. 'No, I thank ye kindly; it's not out, I see,' she replied, stirring it up with a bit of stick previous to commencing the smoking with which she solaced her laziness.

'That's a bad plan,' observed our friend, who continued his labour as diligently as if the sun was rising instead of setting.

'What is, Aigle dear?'

'Keeping the pipe a-light in yer pocket, ma'am ; it might chance to burn ye, and it's sure to waste the tobacco.'

'Augh!' exclaimed the wife, 'what long heads some people have! God grant we may never want the bit o' tobacco! Sure it would be hard if we did; we're bad enough off without that.'

'But if ye did, ye know, ma'am, ye'd be sorry ye wasted it; wouldn't ye?'

'Och, Aigle dear, the poverty is bad enough whin it comes, not to be looking out for it.'

'If you expected an inimy to come and burn yer house' ('Lord defend us!' ejaculated the woman), 'what would you do?'

'Is it what would I do? bedad, that's a quare question. I'd pervint him, to be sure.'

'And that's what I want to do with the poverty,' he answered, sticking his spade firmly into the earth; and, leaning on it with folded arms, he rested for a moment on his perfect limb, and looked earnestly in her face. 'Ye see every one on the sod-green though it is, God bless it-is somehow or other born to some sort of poverty. Now, the thing is to go past it, or undermine it, or get rid of it, or prevent it.'

Ah, thin, how?' said Mrs Radford.

"By forethought, prudence; never to let a farthing's worth go to waste, or spend a penny if ye can do with a halfpenny. Time makes

the most of us-we ought to make the most of him; so I'll go on with my work, ma'am, if you please; I can work and talk at the same time.'

Mrs Radford looked a little affronted; but she thought better of it, and repeated her favourite maxim, 'Fair and aisy goes far in a day?'

So it does ma'am ; nothing like it; it's wonderful what a dale can be got on with by it, keeping on, on, and on, always at something. When I'm tired at the baskets, I take a turn at the tubs and when I'm wearied with them, I tie up the heath-and sweet it is, sure enough; it makes one envy the bees to smell the heather! And when I've had enough of that, I get on with the garden, or knock bits of furniture out of the timber the sea drifts up after those terrible storms.'

'We burn that,' said Mrs Radford.

'There's plenty of turf and furze to be had for the cutting; it's a sin, where there's so much furniture wanting, to burn any timber -barring chips,' replied Eagle.

'Bedad, I don't know what ill-luck sea-timber might bring,' said the woman.

'Augh! augh! the worst luck that ever came into a house is idleness, except, maybe, extravagance.'

'Well, thin, Aigle dear!' exclaimed Mrs Radford, 'what's come to ye to talk of extravagance?-what in the world have poor craythurs like us to be extravagant with?'

'Yer time,' replied Burnt Eagle, with particular emphasis; 'yer time.'

'Ah, thin, man, sure it's "time enough" for us to be thinking of that whin we can get anything for it?

'Make anything of it, ye mean, ma'am: the only work it'll ever do of itself, if it's let alone, will be destruction.'

'Well!' exclaimed Mrs Radford indignantly, 'it's a purty pass we're come to, if what we do in our own place is to be comed over by a stranger who has no call to the country. I'd like to know who you are, upsetting the ways of the place, and making something out of nothing like a fairy man! If my husband did go to the whisky shop, I'll pay him off for it myself; it's no business of yours; and maybe we'll be as well off in the long-run as them that are so mean and thoughtful, and turning their hand to every man's trade, and making gentlemen's houses out of mud cabins, and fine gardens in the sand-hills; doing what nobody ever did before! It won't have a blessing-mark my words! Ye're an unfriendly man, so ye are. After my wearing out my bones, and bringing the children to see ye, never to notice them, or ask a poor woman to sit down, or offer her a bit of tobacco, when it's rolls upon rolls of it ye might have unknownst, without duty, if ye liked, and ye here on the sea-coast.'

'I have nothing that doesn't pay duty,' replied Burnt Eagle, smiling at her bitterness. 'I don't go to deny that the Excise is hard upon a man, but I can get my bit of bread without breaking the law, and I'd rather have no call to what I don't rightly understand. Í am sure ye're heartily welcome to anything I have to give. I offered to make a gate for yer sty, to keep yer pig out of the cabbages, and I'm sure'

Again Mrs Radford, who was none of the gentlest, interrupted him. 'We are ould residenters in the place, and don't want any of your improvements, Misther Burnt Aigle, thank you, sir,' she said, drawing herself up with great dignity, thrusting her pipe into her pocket, and summoning her stray flock, some of whom had entered Crab Hall without any ceremony, while others wandered at their 'own sweet will' in places of dirt and danger-'I daresay we shall get on very well without improvement. We're not for setting ourselves above our neighbours; we're not giving up every bit of innocent divarsion for slavery, and thin having no one to lave for what we make-no chick nor child!'

'Woman!' exclaimed Burnt Eagle fiercely, and he shook his crutch at the virago, who, astonished at the generally placid man's change, drew back in terror; 'go home to yer own piggery, follow yer own plan, waste the time the Almighty gives to the poorest in the land, gossip and complain, and make mischief; what advice and help I had to give, I gave to ye and to others ever since I came in the place; follow yer own way, but lave me to follow mine-time will tell who's right and who's wrong.'

'Well, I'm sure!' said Mrs Radford, quailing beneath his bright and flashing eye, 'to think of that now! how he turns on us like a wild baste out of his sand-hole, and we in all frindship! Well, to be sure sure there was "time enough

'Mammy, mammy!' shouted one of the seven 'hopes' of the Radford family, 'ye 're smoking behind, ye 're smoking behind!'

"Oh, the marcy of Heaven about me!' she exclaimed, Burnt Aigle's a witch; it's he has set fire to me with a wink of his eye, to make his words good about the coal and the pipe in my pocket. Oh, thin, to see how I'm murdered intirely through the likes of him! I've carried a live-coal in my pocket many's the day, and it never sarved me so before! Oh, it's thrue, I'm afeared, what's said of ye, that ye gave the use of one of yer legs to the devil-mother of marcy purtect me!-to the devil for knowledge and luck; and me that always denied it to be sarved so. Don't come near me I'll put it out meself; oh, to think of the beautiful gownd, bran-new it was last Christmas was a year! Am I out now, children dear? Oh, it's yer mother's made a show of before the country to plase him! What would come over the coal to do me such a turn as that now, and never to think of it afore! Oh, sorra was in me to come near yer improvements !'

'Mammy,' interrupted the eldest boy, 'don't be hard upon Burnt Aigle ; there's the coal that dropt out of the pipe, red hot still-see, here where ye stood-and the priest tould ye the danger of it long ago.'

'Oh, sure it's not going to put the holy man's advice ye are on a level with Burnt Aigle's! Come, we'll be off. I meant to take off my beautiful gownd before I came out, but thought it would be "time enough" whin I'd go back. And to see what a bocher has brought ye to, Judith Radford.' And away she went fuming and fretting over the sand-hills, stopping every moment to look back at the devastation which her own carelessness had occasioned her solitary dress. Burnt Eagle imagined he was alone, and kept his eyes fixed upon the foolish woman as she departed, but his attention was arrested by Mrs Radford's second daughter, who stole round the lame man, and touched his hard hand with her little fingers.

'Ye're not a witch, are ye, daddy?' she said, while looking up smilingly, but with an expression of awe, in his face.

'No, darlint.'

"Twas the coal done it-wasn't it?' 'It was.'

Mother

'Well, good-night, Burnt Aigle ; kiss little Ailey-there. will forget it all or have it all out-the same thing, you know. I hav'nt forgot the purty noggin you gave me; only it hurts mother to see how you get on with a little, and father blames her, and gets tipsy; so just go on yer own way, and don't heed us. Mother wants that the sun should shine only on one side of the blackberries; but I'll larn of ye, Daddy Aigle, if ye'll tache me; only don't bother the mother with what she has no heart to, and sets the back of her hand against.' And after asking for another kiss, the little barefooted pretty girl-whose heart was warm, and who would have been a credit to any country if she had been well managed-darted over the banks like a fawn, her small lissom figure graceful as a Greek statue, her matted yellow hair streaming behind her, and her voice raised to the tune of 'Peggy Bawn.'

'It's truth she says God's truth, anyway,' said Burnt Eagle, as he turned to enter his cottage. 'It's truth; they set the back of their hand and the back of their mind against improvement; they'd be ready to tear my eyes out if I tould them what keeps them back. Why, their own dislike to improvement, part; and the carelessness of their landlords, part; the want of sufficient employment, a great part; and, above all, their being satisfied with what they get, and not trying to get better. As long as they're content with salt and potato, they try for nothing else. Set John Bull down to salt and potato, and see how he'll look, and why shouldn't you get as good, Paddy agrah! But no; you won't; a little more method, a little more capital employed amongst you, and plenty of steadiness, would

make you equal to anything the world produced since it was a world. But no: ye keep on at yer ould ways, and yer ould sayings, and all things ould, and ye let others that haven't the quarter of yer brains get the start of ye. Yet where, Paddy, upon the face of the earth, is a finer man or a brighter head than your own?'

The

old man shut his door, and lit his lamp, which was made of a large scallop-shell, the wick floating in oil he had extracted from the blubber of a grampus that otherwise would have decayed unnoticed on the shore.

I have told all I heard as to Burnt Eagle's first settlement in what I still call 'my neighbourhood.' I will now tell what I know, and what occurred some time after. I very well remember being taken by my mother, who was a sort of domestic doctor to the poor, to see Judy Radford, who, plunged into the depths of Irish misery, was mourning the loss of her husband, drowned because of the practice of the principle that it was 'time enough' to mend the boat; it had taken the boys often, and why not now?' But the boat went down, and the poor, overworked, good-natured father and his eldest son were lost! We could hardly get to the door for the slough and abominations that surrounded it. 'Judy,' said my mother, 'if this was collected and put at the back of the house, you need not have come begging to the steward for manure.'

'Och, ma'am, wont it be "time enough" to gather it when we have the seed potatoes?-sure it was always there, and the young ducks would be lost without it.

'Such a heap of impurity must be unhealthy.'

"We has the health finely, thank God! if we had everything else ;' and then followed a string of petitions, and lamentations and complaints of her neighbours, all uttered with the whine of discontent which those who deserve poverty indulge in, while those who are struggling against it seek to conceal, from a spirit of decency, the extent of their wants. 'Indeed, ma'am,' she continued, 'the ill-luck is after us my second boy has, as all the country knows, the best of characters, and would have got the half acre at the Well corner if he had gone to his honour in time for it, and that would have been the help to us sure enough; but we thought there was "time enough," and Bill Deasy, who's put up to all sorts of sharpness by Burnt Aigle, got the promise.'

'Well, did Ailey get the flax-wheel I told her she could have from Lucy Green until she was able to buy one?'

'Oh, ma'am, there it is again; I kep her at home just that one day on account of a hurt I got in my thumb, and thought it would be "time enough" to be throubling yer honour for a plaster if it got worse-which it did, praise be to God!—and never did a hand's turn with it since; and whin she went after it, Miss Lucy had lint it, and was stiffer about it than was needful. My girl tould her she thought she'd be "time enough," and she hurt her feelings,