Willy Burke, or, The Irish orphan in America - Digital Repository ...

22 WILLY BURKE; OK,
her trifling funds in reserve. Sickness and death, too,
had been busy amongst her little flock ; for her two
youngest children had, one after the other, pined away
and died, and were calmly sleeping in the quiet churchyard.
Their death was a severe trial for the mother's
heart (as it ever is to lose a beloved child under any circumstances);
but when reason and religion had exerted
their mild influence on her soul, she acknowledged with a
grateful heart that God had given her a new proof of His
love, in thus taking to Himself her fatherless children ere
yet they had been subjected to the fire of tribulation, or
their pure hearts contaminated by the vices of the world*
Just about the end of the first year of widowhood she
obtained the washing of a few families of respectable
standing, and, through their influence, others were induced
to give her employment. Her two eldest children,
being boys, could do nothing, it is true, to assist their
mother in the house ; but the two girls, although only
ten and eight respectively, were so docile and so industrious,
that they did much to lighten her labour. Neat
and tidy they were, too, and it did their mother's heart
good to see how cheerfully and willingly they went about
their work. After a little time, the eldest boy, Peter,
obtained a situation as errand-boy in a commercial establishment,
and his earnings, trifling though they might
be, were a sensible assistance to his mother, to whom
they were duly arid regularly given up. Hitherto our old
acquaintance, Willy, had been of a remarkably cheerful,
lively disposition ; but about this time his mother remarked
that he became silent and pensive, as though
something weighed heavily on his young mind. At first
she thought that this might proceed from the loneliness