DEAR SIR: Thank you for being kind to me. I was fond of you. I hope you won't be out of a boy long. There do be a very honest boy named Mickey McGooley goes to my school I used to go to. He has a iron foot, but he is good-looking in the rest of him. I think he would come if you asked him. Please tell the other gentilmen I won't forget him either.
_Ninth Anti-Sassenach Bank, Belfast, Ireland._
SIR: My mother she is named Mrs. M. O'Kinsella, will send you the papers from McClutch and Gullim. As I will be dead you pay my money please to her. I let you know now so that it will be all rite. It began last May 28th and stops Saturday, October 21st. Yours truly, hoping you will send it soon,
DEAR MOTHER: You must cheer up and not cough. You can go to France or somewhere. You will find a heap of lengths of linen stuff in a box under the steps of old Tom's shop. He doesn't know about it. It is mine and the nicest they is, and if you don't be wanting it, you can sell it. Then you look in the lining of Danny's cap, and find some bank papers, and you send them to the Ninth anti-Sassenach Bank in Belfast and it will send you nigh twelve pound gold. You will find Winny and me by Richmond Bridge, and it will not be so expencive without us. I hope you won't be low for me, for Nora says she will be good. Dear mother, I dident know any other way to make you happy and well at this present. Goodbye from your loving son,
HUGH CORMAC FITZEUSTACE LE POER O'KINSELLA.
After that laborious signature, he folded and addressed the first two sheets, and after a plunge into the recesses of his pocket, stamped them. The last one he slipped beneath his mother's pillow. He looked at her wistfully, lying there on the brink of all compensation, at last! She turned over, and sighed feebly: "Go to bed, Hughey dear." He did not dare to kiss her, for fear she should become wide awake. Back into the shadow he shrank, and so remained a long time. A dim sense of defeat stole over him, like a draught through a crack, from a wind which pushes vainly without. But he had never in his life hugged any thought whose interest centred in himself; and immediately his whole being warmed again with the remembrance that his defeat meant victory for a life dearer to him than his own. When the great bell outside had struck two, he crept across the room.