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"You are the only unmarried girl we have left now," he said, "and surely you ought neither to be too proud nor too saucy to refuse such a match as Mark Hanratty a young man in as thrivin' a business as there is in all Ballykeerin; hasn't he a good shop, good business, and a good back of friends in the country that will stand to him, an' only see how he has thruv these last couple o' years.
Toal Finnigan, and about six or eight dissolute and drunken fellows, inhabitants of Ballykeerin, were his constant companions, and never had they a drinking bout that he was not sent for: sometimes they would meet in his own workshop, which was turned into a tap-room, and there drink the better part of the day.
Of what occurred subsequently in the public house, it is not necessary to give any account, especially as we must follow Art home simply premising, before we do so, that the fact of "Art Maguire having broken the pledge," had been known that very night to almost all Ballykeerin thanks to the industry of Toal Finnigan, and his other friends.
In truth, Art now wondered at the life he had led, he could not understand it; why he should have suffered himself, for the sake of a vile and questionable enjoyment if enjoyment that could be called, which was no enjoyment at least for the sake of a demoralizing and degrading habit, to fall down under the feet as it were, under the evil tongues, and the sneers of those who constituted his world the inhabitants of Ballykeerin was now, that he had got rid of the thraldom, perfectly a mystery to him.
In this condition then were they depending on the scanty aid which her poor exertions could afford them, eked out by the miserable pittance that he extorted as a beggar when the intelligence arrived that the great Apostle of Temperance had appointed a day on which to hold a teetotal meeting in the town of Ballykeerin.
Be this, however, as it may, we have only to state, in continuation of our narrative, that at the period of Art Maguire's most lamentable degradation, and while his admirable but unhappy wife was stretched upon the burning bed of fever, the far low sounds of the Temperance Movement were heard, and the pale but pure dawn of its distant light seen at Ballykeerin.
'There never stood, says he, 'sich a couple in the chapel of of Aughindrumon, nor there never walked sich a couple up or down the street of Ballykeerin that's the chat, says he: an' whisper, Frank, ne neither did there. Whe where is Margaret's aiquil, I'd I'd like to know? an' as for me, I'll measure myself across the shouldhers aginst e'er a a man, woman, or child in in the parish.
"Don't be talking' about betther men here," said Jerry Shannon; "I tell you, Toal, there's a man in this room, and when you get me a betther man in the town of Ballykeerin, I'll take a glass of punch wid you, or a pair o' them, in spite of all the pledges in Europe!" "And who is that, Jerry," said Toal. "There he sits," replied Jerry, putting his extended palm upon Art's shoulder and clapping it.
He died of consumption in the workhouse of Ballykeerin, and there could not be a stronger proof of the fallacy with which he reasoned than the gratifying fact, that he had not been more than two months dead, when his son recovered his reason, to the inexpressible joy of his mother; so that had he followed up his own sense of what was right, he would have lived to see his most sanguine wishes, with regard to his son, accomplished, and perhaps have still been able to enjoy a comparatively long and happy life.
He was now pointed out to strangers as the man, who, almost naked, used to stand drunk and begging upon the bridge of Ballykeerin, surrounded by his starving and equally naked children.
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