when you come to think of it? So we have got it into the speech;
and I, I myself, Sarah, am drilling young Demos-thenes, and he is
so apt a scholar that I find myself rather pleasantly employed."
Having read her letter, Mrs. Carriswood hesitated a second
and then added Derry's information at the bottom of the page.
"I suppose the lordly ancestor was one of King James's creation--
see Macaulay, somewhere in the second volume. I dare say there
is a drop or two of good blood in the boy. He has the manners
of a gentleman--but I don't know that I ever saw an Irishman,
no matter how low in the social scale, who hadn't."

Thus it happened that Tommy's valedictory scored a success
that is a tradition of the High School, and came to be printed
in both the city papers; copies of which journals Tommy's
mother has preserved sacredly to this day; and I have no doubt,
could one find them, they would be found wrapped around a yellow
photograph of the "A Class" of 1870: eight pretty girls in white,
smiling among five solemn boys in black, and Tommy himself,
as the valedictorian, occupying the centre of the picture
in his new suit of broadcloth, with a rose in his buttonhole
and his hair cut by a professional barber for the occasion.

It was the story of the famine that really captured the audience;
and Tommy told it well, with the true Irish fire, in a beautiful voice.

In the front seat of the parquette a little old man in a wrinkled
black broadcloth, with a bald head and a fringe of whisker under
his long chin, and a meek little woman, in a red Paisley shawl,
wept and laughed by turns. They had taken the deepest interest
in every essay and every speech. The old man clapped his large hands