About thirty years ago, a family named Carrol, or Carryl, emigrated from the North of Ireland, and settled in Coldwater, a little fishing-village of Michigan.
They were sober and hard-working, but dull and ignorant, and in no way different from others of their class, except in their unusual strong affection for each other. Old Carrol, however, a rheumatic old man of sixty, with this weak, jealous pride in his "b'ys," working late and early to keep them clothed, to pay his wife's doctor's-bills, and trying to lay up enough to buy the two girls a feather-bed and a clock when they were married, stood in no need of whiskey or dances to keep him alive; this and his wife's ill health separated them from the fighting, rollicking Irish crew of the hamlet,--set them apart, so to speak, to act upon each other. Carrol, with one of his sons, worked in a saw-mill, and the other boys, as they grew old enough, easily found jobbing, being known as honest, plodding fellows. The little drama of their lives bade fair to be quiet, and the characters wrought out of it commonplace enough, had not Death thrust his grim face into the scene.
The youngest child was a girl, Ellen, born long after the others, and, like most children coming in the advanced age of their parents, was peculiar: the family traits had worn themselves out, new elements came in. The Irish neighbors, seeing how closely the girl was kept in-doors, and the anxious guard held over her by her father and brothers, thought her a "natural" or "innocent," whether she was or not. The Carrols kept their own counsel, and warded off gossip as best they could. It was from Ellen I heard how the change came among them first. "It was a fever," she said. "John took it, and little Phil, and then Jane. Jane was the oldest of us; it was she as nursed mother and kept the house. She looked as old as mother. Evenings she'd put on a white apron, and take me on her knee and sing for us. But she took the fever, and they're all three gone away"; which was always Ellen's phrase for death. She stopped there, adding afterwards quietly, that it was about that time the trouble in her head first came. Ellen took her sister's place in "keeping the house"; she had enough mind to learn the daily routine of cleaning and the little cooking. Her mother was a cripple for life, confined to her bed most of the time: a credulous, nervous woman,--the one idea in her narrow brain a passionate love for her husband and children.