I thought of her laughing among the rocks of the reef, with the sunlight in her hair. I thought of her singing in the boat as she and the others rowed home. I have heard of girls singing blithely over their wheels as they spun flax for their bridal linen; but no man ever yet heard of a girl singing over the making of her shroud! Yet, if Onnie worked all summer in order to make money to take her to America, it must have been for her very like the sewing of a shroud.
It is thus, at all events, that the mothers of our Irish boys and girls think about the emigration to America.
"I've had seven children," one of them will say, "and I've lost five of them. Two of them I buried and three are gone to America."
And yet Onnie sang over the business merrily! I went my way, wondering what the future had hidden in it for her and what America would make of her.
I do not know the end—the final achievement of Onnie Dever; but chance gave me a glimpse of her halfway through her career. I was in one of the large cities of the Middle West, a place that boasts about its progress with boasting that is entirely justified. It is a city that has gone ahead fast in the last fifteen years, and which is destined, I imagine, to go faster yet, and to go very far. My wife was with me, and certain needs of hers
