The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys

Little Jim had never been farther than General Brady's kitchen. It was a kitchen of which he approved because it had no path in it. One might go through it in a great hurry with...

The next morning Pat stepped out into the kitchen and donned his apron in a downcast mood. The uplift of his mother's praise had passed, and the fact remained that to-day he was...

"Well, then, your studyin' has done you small good, for you talk pretty much the way I do mysilf, and niver a bit of that book did I be larnin' in my loife. It don't make a bit...

Pat had now been in Mr. Farnham's employ two months and more, and never had his faithfulness slackened. He had caught the knack of measuring goods easily and tying up packages n...

"There's another day comin'," little Jim had said when he lay down in acknowledged defeat on the night that followed his first day of real trying. The other day came, and after...

It was the last day of August that Pat went walking down to do his marketing with a jubilant air. Next week school was to begin, and with the beginning of the term he had expect...

There is no whip to ambition like success. Every day the widow thought, and toiled, and kept her eyes open for chances for her boys. "For, after all," said she, "twenty-one doll...

According to Mrs. O'Callaghan's plans, the moving was accomplished the next day. There was but one load of household goods, so that the two teams of their kind neighbor made onl...

A month went along very quietly and, following that, another month. The weeds that had flourished along the sides of the ditches were all dead. No more did the squawking O'Calla...

The shanty by the tracks had never seen such rejoicing as occurred within its cheap walls that January evening. Pat had said nothing at supper time of his wonderful news concern...

Summer time came again. The stove went out into the airy kitchen, and a larger flock of geese squawked in the weeds and ditches. Again Andy and Jim drove the cows, Andy of a mor...

The fall term opened and found Mike the head of the O'Callaghan tribe, as the brothers had been jeeringly called by the Jim Barrows set. And Mike was a good head. The sort of bo...

"Sure, an' sivin's the parfect number," she said through her tears as she looked round on her flock; "and Tim was the bist man as iver lived, may the saints presarve him an' ris...

"It's Andy that makes me astonished quite," observed Mrs. O'Callaghan. "Here it is the first of December and him three months at Gineral Brady's and gettin' fat on it. He niver...

"I'm ready, ma'am," announced Pat, coming to the sitting-room door a little later. "Will you be havin' me to take the list to General Brady, or will you be havin' me to be doin'...

Jim was enterprising. Far more enterprising than anybody gave him credit for. He had been set to copy the General, and that night as he lay down to sleep he resolved to outdo Pa...

Pat blushed with pleasure, and, advancing, took the flower. The poor Irish boy had instinctively dainty tastes, and the love of flowers was one of them. But even before the blos...

Is Friday an unlucky day? You could not get Mrs. O'Callaghan to think so, for it was upon the Friday that closed a week of anxious thinking that Mrs. Brady called at the shanty....

"If I'm goin', I may as well go," thought Pat as he left his mother's door on that mid-April Saturday morning. And away he went on the railroad track at a rapid pace that did no...

There was a certain part of Wennott which its own residents were wont to think was _the_ part of town in which to live. Sometimes in confidence they even congratulated themselve...

Sunday dawned cold and blustering--a sullen day that seemed hardly to know which way was best to make itself disagreeable, and so tried them all. The stock had been removed. The...