The Kellys and the OKellys | Page 3

County Mayo, where he held three
or four hundred wretchedly bad acres under Lord Ballindine, and one
or two other small farms, under different landlords. He was a
good-looking young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, with that
mixture of cunning and frankness in his bright eye, which is so
common among those of his class in Ireland, but more especially so in
Connaught.
The mother of these two young men kept an inn in the small town of
Dunmore, and though from the appearance of the place, one would be
led to suppose that there could not be in Dunmore much of that kind of
traffic which innkeepers love, Mrs Kelly was accounted a warm,
comfortable woman. Her husband had left her for a better world some
ten years since, with six children; and the widow, instead of making
continual use, as her chief support, of that common wail of being a
poor, lone woman, had put her shoulders to the wheel, and had earned
comfortably, by sheer industry, that which so many of her class, when
similarly situated, are willing to owe to compassion.

She held on the farm, which her husband rented from Lord Ballindine,
till her eldest son was able to take it. He, however, was now a gauger in
the north of Ireland. Her second son was the attorney's clerk; and the
farm had descended to Martin, the younger, whom we have left jostling
and jostled at one of the great doors of the Four Courts, and whom we
must still leave there for a short time, while a few more of the
circumstances of his family are narrated.
Mrs Kelly had, after her husband's death, added a small grocer's
establishment to her inn. People wondered where she had found the
means of supplying her shop: some said that old Mick Kelly must have
had money when he died, though it was odd how a man who drank so
much could ever have kept a shilling by him. Others remarked how
easy it was to get credit in these days, and expressed a hope that the
wholesale dealer in Pill Lane might be none the worse. However this
might be, the widow Kelly kept her station firmly and constantly
behind her counter, wore her weeds and her warm, black, stuff dress
decently and becomingly, and never asked anything of anybody.
At the time of which we are writing, her two elder sons had left her,
and gone forth to make their own way, and take the burden of the world
on their own shoulders. Martin still lived with his mother, though his
farm lay four miles distant, on the road to Ballindine, and in another
county for Dunmore is in County Galway, and the lands of Toneroe, as
Martin's farm was called, were in the County Mayo. One of her three
daughters had lately been married to a shop-keeper in Tuam, and
rumour said that he had got œ500 with her; and Pat Daly was not the
man to have taken a wife for nothing. The other two girls, Meg and
Jane, still remained under their mother's wing, and though it was to be
presumed that they would soon fly abroad, with the same comfortable
plumage which had enabled their sister to find so warm a nest, they
were obliged, while sharing their mother's home, to share also her
labours, and were not allowed to be too proud to cut off pennyworths of
tobacco, and mix dandies of punch for such of their customers as still
preferred the indulgence of their throats to the blessing of Father
Mathew.
Mrs. Kelly kept two ordinary in-door servants to assist in the work of
the house; one, an antiquated female named Sally, who was more
devoted to her tea-pot than ever was any bacchanalian to his glass.

Were there four different teas in the inn in one evening, she would have
drained the pot after each, though she burst in the effort. Sally was, in
all, an honest woman, and certainly a religious one she never neglected
her devotional duties, confessed with most scrupulous accuracy the
various peccadillos of which she might consider herself guilty; and it
was thought, with reason, by those who knew her best, that all the extra
prayers she said and. they were very many were in atonement for
commissions of continual petty larceny with regard to sugar. On this
subject did her old mistress quarrel with her, her young mistress
ridicule her; of this sin did her fellow-servant accuse her; and,
doubtless, for this sin did her Priest continually reprove her; but in vain.
Though she would not own it, there was always sugar in her pocket,
and though she declared that she usually drank her tea unsweetened,
those who had come upon her unawares