GRANNY.

place, swimming with it against his “upper” side.

The water grew deeper. Suddenly the lantern
unaccountably disappeared from the knoll—it had
gone with Bridget and the babies—and Terry had
no longer any idea whither they were tending. The
loud, steady rush of the broad river into which the
brook emptied in full view from the O’Toole cottage,
sounded ominously near.

Before ten minutes had passed, it seemed to Terry
as though he had been wading for a whole day, and
as though he might as well give it up altogether,
excepting for Granny’s courage and calmness.

“Tet the raft go, Terry, me boy!” she had said,
observing his exhaustion, and pausing in telling a
story with which she was beguiling the way. “The
old Granny has lived her day, an’ she’s ready to go.”

“Not without yer boy, Granny,” said Terry,
between hard breaths.

At that instant the dim star of light in the little
cabin which had been drifting very fast to the south
of them, went out, and their last beacon was gone.
They knew then— Granny as well as Terry — that
the water had crept in and overturned the little
stand on which they had left it burning. Even
Granny gave a long, quivering sigh. ‘Terry tugged
and tugged. He could not speak, for not only was
he strained and tired, but he was very sick at heart.

Suddenly he felt that the rain was ceasing,
and at the same instant the clouds. broke a little,
and it grew lighter. A knoll in the meadow scraped
the raft, and Terry sprang upon the small, but
precious Ararat, keeping tight hold of his swaying
charge meamwhile, and clinging to a stout young
tree which perhaps a kind, foreseeing Providence
had planted directly on top of the-knoll.

Terry could almost have cried, great stout fellow
that he was, sitting there in the shallows on the
knoll, clinging to the tree, dripping wet from top
to toe, sore and tired to the last degree, his home
gone, and seeing nothing but a watery grave at last,
for the dear old Granny and himself, and the
precious “hins.”

But the moon began just then to make its presence
known, and after a moment’s struggle with the flying
clouds, shone out clear, and full, and bright. The
tempest was evidently over, and Terry’s heart began
to come back to him.

“ Hooray, Granny!” he cried with a crazy laugh.
“Here we are! We'll sail a few steps further,
and if we can’t get on, we’ll come back here.

233

We can hold out here, if we can’t anywhere else.”

Granny’s teeth were chattering with the cold, but
she went on cheerfully with her discourse:

“And thus it was with the beautiful princess,
‘ Alack, me lord,’ she said, with the tears streaming
down her purty cheeks, ‘I’m no’ ungrateful to ye.
T’ll not forget“how in the darkness an’ the storm ye
stood by me.’”

“An’ I niver understood it so well before,” said
Terry, putting his face up close to the dear old
story-teller’s, to see just how she looked once more.

The wind blew her soft hair about her forehead,
but the blue eyes were shining underneath, and the
kind old lips were smiling as they had always smiled
on Terry ever since he could remember.

Again he shouted to his father, and this time he
heard a faint response ; but it was far up the stream,
and as cloud after cloud blew by, and the wild moon
lighted up the scene more brilliantly, Terry could see
that the knoll on which they rested was on the high |
bank of the wide, swift, lonely river itself, and that a
few steps further would have taken him far beyond
his depth, and have consigned both himself and
Granny to certain death.

Having now got his exact bearing, and the rain
having subsided, Terry struck out boldly for a shore.
The family came running along the bank to meet
him, and a great shout burst from all the shivering
group as Terry with his raft slowly made the land.

The hens were clucking, and the cocks were crow-
ing; the blankets and wraps had mostly fallen off in
the struggle with the waters, but Granny, with her
soft locks blowing, and the water dripping from her
soaked clothes, sat placid and unruffled amid the
tumult, though she was shaking with the cold, and
though she knew that they had lost everything.

“ An’ it’s a foine moonlit sail the boy has given the
old Granny!” she said with her own delightful
brogue. ‘An’ it’s a foine house he'll build us again.”

“ Ab, but I never could have got through it all,”
rejoined Terry, dropping exhausted, and covering her
thin smiling cheek with kisses, “if every time I
could stop to listen, I hadn’t heard the dear voice, for
all the world as if we were sitting by the fireside
yonder, telling me the old brave story of the Princess
of Kilcannel.”

“ An’ she did that, did she?” cried Bridget admir-
ingly, who had just returned from escorting the little
ones to a place of safety. ‘Well, a quare world it is,
and a quare family is the O’Tooles !”