Irish Neighbours Author:Jane Barlow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LIBBY-ANNS /N Sunday mornings, a few years ago, the townsfolk of Lisnagort, returning from Mass, sometimes met three short persons shabbily dressed in bla... more »ck, who were the Libby-Anns from No. 5 Main Street on their way to Rathallen Church. So, at least, they were commonly described, the fact that mother, daughter, and granddaughter bore the same Christian name having come to the neighbours' knowledge, and somehow taken their fancy. To speak of them by this collective title had long since grown into a matter of course, yet still retained a faintly jocose flavour. If there had been anything solemn to say about them, the speaker would have tried for the occasion to recall their surname. Beyond that, the young and youngish people knew little about them, and had an impression that No. 5 had been their home for an indefinite period, dating vaguely from time out of mind. The older inhabitants, however, were better acquainted with their past history, even remembering Mrs. Gavin's first arrival at Lisnagort. With her small daughter she had fled thither,about thirty years back, as to the only refuge left her amid the wreck of her family fortunes. For her husband had died overwhelmed with debt accumulated during a disastrous career on the turf, which had swallowed up his estate, and bedraggled his good name in a quagmire of insolvency. Yet her grave financial difficulties were perhaps the least significant part of her troubles at that time, as the death of ne'er-do-weel Tom Gavin had followed hard on the loss of two children carried off by a vulture-like swoop of diphtheria, thereby leaving her in possession of only little Libby-Ann, the youngest child. Her eldest, Edward, had been always brought up by her own parents, in whose charge it now became of course more than ever desirable th...« less