CHAPTER VIII .-- Poverty and Sorrow.
A Winter Morning--Father Roche--A Mountain Journey--Raymond Na-hattha--Cabin on the Moors--M'Clutchy's Bloodhounds--The Conflict--A Treble Death.
It is the chill and ghastly dawn of a severe winter morning; the gray, cheerless opening of day borrows its faint light only for the purpose of enabling you to see that the country about you is partially covered with snow, and that the angry sky is loaded with storm.

The rising sun, like some poverty-stricken invalid, driven, as it were, by necessity, to the occupation of the day, seems scarcely able to rise, and does so with a sickly and reluctant aspect.

Abroad, there is no voice of joy or kindness--no cheerful murmur with which the heart can sympathize--all the warm and exhilarating harmonies that breathe from nature in her more genial moods are silent.

A black freezing spirit darkens the very light of day, and throws its dismal shadow upon everything about us, whilst the only sounds that fall upon the ear are the roaring of the bitter winds among the naked trees, or the hoarse voice of the half-frozen river, rising and falling--now near, and now far away in the distance.
On such a morning as this it was, and at such an hour, that a pale-faced, thin woman, with all the melancholy evidences of destitution and sorrow about her, knocked at the door of her parish priest, the Rev.Francis Roche.

The very knock she gave had in it a character of respectful but eager haste.