Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/183

 the right to ask a seat of God. He would tell God he had bought a seat in Heaven and paid for it. He would go again to dinners and to house parties and great receptions. . ..

In the midst of these thoughts he seemed to hear the voice of someone talking quite near at hand. He listened and presently he recognized the voice. It was Fulco's. He had not gone away after all. He had been in the next room all the while, and now he was down on his fat knees, praying to God for the soul of Father d'Astier. 

HE citizens of Winnebago Falls came long before she died to think of Mary Bosanky simply and primitively as a town character, placing her in the category of those who were a little less than human. Most of them thought of her until her death simply as a drunken old Irishwoman who worked a little when she was sober, who went along the streets muttering to herself and who died in the end at the county poorhouse. But none of them had seen her as she stepped ashore from a sailing ship at New Orleans in the year of the Great Irish Famine. Then she was twenty-six, buxom, strong as a man, and handsome with black hair and blue eyes and a fine high color. She could neither read nor write but she boasted when drunk that she was descended from the Kings of Clare. Toward the end it was a boast that she used more and more fre-