MOTHER MORAN'S ENEMIES.

CHAPTER I.

A LODGING IN THE COLD, COLD, GROUND.

"OF

H, thin blessings on the day! but sure it's Masther Gordon?" was the exclamation that fell on the ear of Gordon Hastings, of Her Majesty's Guards, as he went stumbling through drifted snow, and over frozen mounds of slush, on his way down to Balaklava, towards the middle of January, 1855. The boy for he was little over sixteen years of age, and had been hurried away from Eton, and landed on the bleak shores of the Crimea only a month before-lifted the peak of his fur cap in astonishment, looked round, but failed to see any one in the dreary waste of snow he was gloomily traversing.

'Sure, he doesn't see me now," went on the same voice; "fulish ould woman that I am; an' me burried in this hole like a sewer rat! Masther Gordon!" and a most

protruded itself half out of what

It's here I am, nondescript figure appeared to be a

mound of snow, a little on the young officer's right rear. A hard, weather-beaten face, seamed, scarred,

and bronzed to an indescribable hue, and capped with a head-dress apparently manufactured out of horse-skin; a miscellaneous pile of garments, surmounted by a soldier's blue hospital great-coat; and the upper part of a nether garment, that could hardly by any possible freak of the imagination be deemed a petticoat-such was the being that now met the gaze of Gordon Hastings, who turned to have a closer look at the strange apparition. Shefor in spite of the extraordinary jumble of attire, the person was evidently a woman-beckoned to him (for just then a snow-squall howled past, effectually smothering her voice) to come over to where she was leaning up out of a sort of a pit sunk in the ground. Curiosity prompted him, in spite of the cold and misery he was suffering, to have a closer look at this unaccountable being; so he took a few strides towards her as he asked: 'Who, in the name of goodness are you, and how do you know my name?"

"Sure, thin, ye're haner, doesn't forget ould Ally Moran? an' how I came over last summer, before this weary war, to see the ould servants at ye're father's castle of Knockdooly? An' how you tould me you, yourself, was going to be an officer? and I tould you it's the fine bould soldier ye'd be—an' no one'd be a betther judge of that, than ould Ally

Moran, who's follyed the dhrums since she's a slip of a girl of fifteen?" The old lady burst this series of questions out with great rapidity and vehemence, until the young Guardsman's memory was refreshed, and he recollected the woman- -a soldier's wife, and daughter of a tenant on his father's Irish property -paying them a visit from Fermoy, and amusing every one with her world-wide experiences of the British army, whenever she could get a listener.

"I remember you well enough, Mrs. Moran," he answered, as well as the blinding snow would let him. "But how, in the name of all that's wonderful, did you get here? and what are you doing?"

"Come in; come in-there's a honey-out of the could an' hardship, an' I'll tell you all," she urged. Gordon saw she had a snug warm den, cleaner, too, than his own-lieutenant in the Guards though he was. So he put his pride in his pocket, stepped down some three feet into a conical-shaped pit, took a seat on an empty butter firkin, and thoroughly enjoyed the warmth thrown out from the glowing embers of a root fire. The dwelling—if such it could be called had been actually burrowed out of the earth to the depth of three feet; a sort of pavement of small stones had been beaten into the mud floor: rough sides were formed of all sorts, shapes, and