“Not this—­this is Atty’s, and I won’t break it.”

At that moment Mulrennan entered the room, with Atty behind him, but he had scarcely done so, when Art with all his strength flung the hard beach chair at his head; the lad, naturally anxious to avoid it, started to one side out of its way, and Atty, while in the act of stretching out his arms to run to his father, received the blow which had been designed for the other.  It struck him a little above the temple, and he fell, but was not cut.  The mother, on witnessing the act, raised her arms and shrieked, but on hearing the heavy, but dull and terrible sound of the blow against the poor boy’s head, the shriek was suspended when half uttered, and she stood, her arms still stretched out, and bent a little upwards, as if she would have supplicated heaven to avert it;—­her mouth was half open—­her eyes apparently enlarged, and starting as if it were out of their sockets; there she stood—­for a short time so full of horror as to be incapable properly of comprehending what had taken place.  At length this momentary paralysis of thought passed away, and with all the tender terrors of affection awakened in her heart, she rushed to the insensible boy.  Oh, heavy and miserable night!  What pen can portray, what language describe, or what imagination conceive, the anguish, the agony of that loving mother, when, on raising her sweet, and beautiful, and most affectionate boy from the ground whereon he lay, that fair head, with its flaxen locks like silk, fell utterly helpless now to this side, and now to that!

“Art Maguire,” she said, “fly, fly,”—­and she gave him one look; but, great God! what an object presented itself to her at that moment.  A man stood before her absolutely hideous with horror; his face but a minute ago so healthy and high-colored, now ghastly as that of a corpse, his hands held up and clenched, his eyes frightful, his lips drawn back, and his teeth locked with strong and convulsive agony.  He uttered not a word, but stood with his wild and gleaming eyes riveted, as if by the force of some awful spell, upon his insensible son, his only one, if he was then even that.  All at once he fell down without sense or motion, as if a bullet had gone through his heart or his brain, and there lay as insensible as the boy he had loved so well.

All this passed so rapidly that the apprentice, who seemed also to have been paralyzed, had not presence of mind to do any thing but look from one person to another with terror and alarm.

“Go,” said Margaret, at length, “wake up the girls, and then fly—­oh, fly—­for the doctor.”

The two servant maids, however, had heard enough in her own wild shriek to bring them to this woful scene.  They entered as she spoke, and, aided by the apprentice, succeeded with some difficulty in laying their master on his bed, which was in a back room off the parlor.

“In God’s name, what is all this?” asked one of them, on looking at the insensible bodies of the father and son.