It was late now, nearly eleven o'clock, and the public-houses would
be closed in about a quarter of an hour. A miserable old dame stood
shivering by one, and looking wistfully into the warm and brilliantly
lighted place. She turned her wan and wretched face round when she
heard Hester approaching.

"Good-night, Hetty Wright, and may the Virgin bless you!" she called
out.

"Good-night, Mrs. Flannigan--why, how white and starved you look!
Here's twopence; go in and get a drop of gin."

Hester dropped the coins into the old dame's hand, and hurried quickly
through the damp streets.

The wretched woman gazed at them in a kind of petrifaction. Twopence
from a girl as poor as herself, and she was to buy gin with the money?
Gin! Never before had she been told to go and buy gin. Why, the
missionaries, and all the good folks round, said it was the curse of
the land. And so it was: had it not brought her to what she was? had
it not sent her only son to an untimely grave? Oh, yes--none knew
better than mother Flannigan what gin meant--what cursing and what
tears, and what misery it had caused; and yet the girl with the white
face and the great dark earnest wistful eyes had given her twopence
to buy it, and told her to get warm and comforted. Oh, yes, gin was
bad, but it was very comforting; she would have her two-pennyworth,
and she would go home, and forget her hunger, and sleep comfortably
all night. It was really good of that decent, pale-faced girl to give
her twopence to spend in gin. She knew her: she was the girl with the
voice, the girl about whom some of the neighbors, even in the Irish