The Parents Assistant | Page 6

the end of the
week she was dead and buried, and the orphans were left alone in their
cabin.
The two youngest girls, Peggy and Nancy, were six and seven years old.
Edmund was not yet nine, but he was a stout-grown, healthy boy, and
well disposed to work. He had been used to bring home turf from the
bog on his back, to lead cart-horses, and often to go on errands for
gentlemen's families, who paid him a sixpence or a shilling, according
to the distance which he went, so that Edmund, by some or other of

these little employments, was, as he said, likely enough to earn his
bread; and he told Mary to have a good heart, for that he should every
year grow able to do more and more, and that he should never forget
his mother's words when she last gave him her blessing, and joined
their hands all together.
As for Peggy and Nancy, it was little that they could do; but they were
good children, and Mary, when she considered that so much depended
upon her, was resolved to exert herself to the utmost. Her first care was
to pay those debts which her mother had mentioned to her, for which
she left money done up carefully in separate papers. When all these
were paid away, there was not enough left to pay both the rent of the
cabin and a year's schooling for herself and sisters which was due to the
schoolmistress in a neighbouring village.
Mary was in hopes that the rent would not be called for immediately,
but in this she was disappointed. Mr. Harvey, the gentleman on whose
estate she lived, was in England, and, in his absence, all was managed
by a Mr. Hopkins, an agent, who was a HARD MAN.* The driver
came to Mary about a week after her mother's death, and told her that
the rent must be brought in the next day, and that she must leave the
cabin, for a new tenant was coming into it; that she was too young to
have a house to herself, and that the only thing she had to do was to get
some neighbour to take her and her brother and her sisters in for
charity's sake.
*A hard-hearted man.
The driver finished by hinting that she would not be so hardly used if
she had not brought upon herself the ill-will of Miss Alice, the agent's
daughter. Mary, it is true, had refused to give Miss Alice a goat upon
which she had set her fancy; but this was the only offence of which she
had been guilty, and at the time she refused it her mother wanted the
goat's milk, which was the only thing she then liked to drink.
Mary went immediately to Mr. Hopkins, the agent, to pay her rent; and
she begged of him to let her stay another year in her cabin; but this he
refused. It was now September 25th, and he said that the new tenant
must come in on the 29th, so that she must quit it directly. Mary could
not bear the thoughts of begging any of the neighbours to take her and
her brother and sisters in FOR CHARITY'S SAKE; for the neighbours
were all poor enough themselves. So she bethought herself that she

might find shelter in the ruins of the old castle of Rossmore where she
and her brother, in better times, had often played at hide and seek. The
kitchen and two other rooms near it were yet covered in tolerably well;
and a little thatch, she thought, would make them comfortable through
the winter. The agent consented to let her and her brother and sisters go
in there, upon her paying him half a guinea in hand, and promising to
pay the same yearly.
Into these lodgings the orphans now removed, taking with them two
bedsteads, a stool, chair and a table, a sort of press, which contained
what little clothes they had, and a chest in which they had two hundred
of meal. The chest was carried for them by some of the charitable
neighbours, who likewise added to their scanty stock of potatoes and
turf what would make it last through the winter.
These children were well thought of and pitied, because their mother
was known to have been all her life honest and industrious. "Sure,"
says one of the neighbours, "we can do no less than give a helping hand
to the poor orphans, that are so ready to help themselves." So one
helped to thatch the room in which they were to sleep, and another took
their cow to graze upon his bit of land on condition of having half the
milk; and one and all said they should