he would have run away and left them to Providence. You have no idea, sir, how long a poor woman will bear up against every evil and misfortune if she has children dependent upon her."
"You have now told me the little history of the Seven Shanties, but has no one a garden but yourself. I should think that the man you mentioned last—what's his name?—the man with one leg—he ought to have a garden."
"Daniel M'Leary,—yes, he might do a little in that way, but for two reasons; one is that he cannot dig, for his back is weak,—and a better reason still is, that there's never a shanty but mine that has a bit of land to it. Daniel M'Leary has not even enough for a pig pen if he had wherewithal to feed a pig. He has done, however, all that man could do; he has planted a grape vine behind his shanty, and last summer, being the third year of its bearing, he sold from it five dollars' worth of grapes. He gave me some cuttings; I planted them against the back of my shanty which faces the south, and last summer two of them had a few bunches on them, but the children pulled them off before they were ripe. I don't think, however, it was the neighbours' children."
The next day Mr. Price was able to get out of the little room and enjoy the fresh air of the open commons. He saw, what Mrs. M'Curdy said, that the shanties had no ground attached to them. In front was the road, and behind a precipitous bank, scarcely a foot-path behind that of Bonny Betty. Yet these poor people paid from ten to twelve dollars a year for a piece of ground not more than twenty feet square. Mrs. M'Curdy was on the edge of a common, and her plot took in a strip of land about twenty by a hundred feet; this was the admiration and envy of the neighbours, who all imagined that if they only had "the luck to get such a
