hatred he bore them, as from a consciousness of being the object of their dislike. He nursed his antipathies, such as they were, in privacy; and he stole through the wild avenues that led to his sequestered home with the silent step of guilt, that feared to wake the very echoes of the caverns around him. When accidentally met, he spoke not with the easy familiarity of his countrymen; and when relieved from the presence of strangers, he impatiently hurried to the loneliness of his mountain home.

The human heart, however, under the very worst circumstances of misanthrophy and guilt, desires something to be kind to; and Red Paddy was not entirely without those slender enjoyments which, in the absence of a good reputation, may be supposed to make home comfortable. He had a wife and some half dozen children, who evinced, in their appearance and costume, the sad effects of neglect and poverty. More than three-fourths naked, his offspring bounded through the wilderness above and about them, and exhibited that peculiar and repulsive specimen of humanity known in this country as Bohemian. A father's care, however, was indicated in a healthy robustness of frame; and there was a savage energy about them which filled the hearts of the adjoining farmers with dread. They, like their godless sire, wrought not; they cultivated no garden; they tended no. flocks; they fed no goats; and yet they seemed to have fared sumptuously every day. There might have been something mysterious in all this, were there not frequent inquiries after lost sheep; and as Red Paddy was not one of those who could live on the bounty of ravens, it was shrewdly suspected that he assisted in diminishing the mountain herds. In fact, he was called the sheep-stealer, and he suffered all the odium of such an appellation.

Ten years before, and it was far otherwise. He once stood fair in the world's regard; but having a gentlemanly dislike for severe toil, he cultivated too ardently the intellectual intercourse of the forge (smithy) and the ale-house. In the men ond

VOL. I. May

Aict he

was considered inferior only to the village Vulcan, but in the fair or pattern he knew no equal. His prowess and achievements soon pointed him out as the leader of the Milesian family of the Roonys; and their deadly foes, the Rossitors, from that hour were compelled to adopt a less daring mode of warfare. In a spirit of disappointed pride they sought to palliate their frequent defeats by allegations injurious to Paddy's moral character, and more than hinted that he was assisted by no less potent a combatant than the sable chief himself. It was not difficult to credit this, for Paddy was an extraordinary fighter. Adversaries fell before him as if struck by magic, and men dropped around him in a fair fight as quickly as if they had stood beneath the baneful shade of the upas-tree. His kippeen, as he called his heavy walking stick, was as disastrous in its blows as the club of Hercules; and wherever he appeared, the Roonys were certain to remain conquerors. The despotism of his faction had nearly produced that very desirable blessing--tranquillity, when its fame was dissipated by the influence of a four leaved shamrock. One of the Rossitors was the happy man who possessed this antidote against fairy influence, and he had found it when taking his siesta on a rath in autumn. Now a rath, it is well known, is the usual abode of the little gentlemen,' and a four-leaved trefoil (if that be not a bull) enables you to see things invisible to ordinary eyes. The good people,' however diminutive, cannot escape; and the possessor of the unnatural talisman, on this occasion, had hardly shouted Ballymore and the blue sky over it,' when his eye encountered the vision of an unearthly shadow fighting furiously by the side of Red Paddy. Its form was somewhat indistinct, though of gigantic proportions; and it seemed too shadowy to be called a thing of substance. When Paddy moved, it moved with him; when he shouted, it shouted; and when he struck, it struck also. The Rossitors fell like rotten reeds before them; and they marched like demon victors over the prostrate foe. The owner of the

shamrock paused for a moment, rubbed his eyes with his sleeve, and having satisfied himself of the presence of the invisible auxiliary, he proclaimed to the astonished combatants, A Lanauntshee!' A Lanauntshee!' was repeated in tones of affright, and the contest, as if by general consent, instantly ceased. Who was the guilty wretch who had purchased with his soul such reprehensible assistance, was demanded by a hundred voices, and Red Paddy was no sooner pointed out than every one present, even the furious Roonys, shrunk involuntarily from his hated presence.

all

This, to be sure, was not very kind in Irishmen, for the Lanauntshee is the most obliging and besthumoured of the whole tribe of 'little gentlemen.' No one likes better to do a good turn; he never fights but for fun; and though somewhat irritable, he is easily pacified. Paddy, it is well known, frequently performs wonders against considerable odds, and the thing would be somewhat miraculous, were it not for the unsolicited assistance of the Lanauntshee. This member of the good people,' like the Phooka, is a perfect Proteus. Like some modern statesmen, he is things by turns, and nothing long;' and as he can assume all shapes at ease, he sometimes encounters Paddy after a hard night's drinking, in the form of a bull or a buffalo; and anon he appears in cap and jacket, mounted like a jockey on a neighing steed. The podreen mare was, according to Sir Harcourt Lees, certainly rode by one, and there can be little doubt that the Hon. Edward Petre's Brunswicker owed his swiftness to one of these Irish riders; who, like all' gentlemen,' is partial to the professors of the 'auld religion.'

Seeing that the Lanauntshee is so capricious of his favours, it was not quite fair in the Roonys and the Rossitors to proscribe Red Paddy, even supposing that he had profited by such an ally; but popular opinion, as many patriots know to their cost, is extremely unstable, and the wretched Paddy, like other public servants, was treated with the worst ingratitude. No one spoke to him; the children pointed at him; and the

old women, with a kind of prayers closely allied to maledictions, besought him to abandon his unholy connexions. In a few months Paddy was a ruined man. The magistrate of the district was alone inaccessible to popular dislike; and, with the view, probably, of consoling him under his afflictions, bestowed on him the hand of one of his servant maids. Paddy's nuptials provoked the laugh of the scorner, and the censorious were not slow to whisper that Justice Harpley had bribed him to cloak his own indiscretions.

It is not easy to resist the force of public hatred when concentrated on one unhappy head. Red Paddy soon retired from it to the common of Monabeg, and lived, it was supposed, by preying upon the property of those who had proscribed him. There may be some persons silly enough to ask, if he were a sheep-stealer, why he was not brought to justice. The answer is obvious. Justice, in those times, was not very accessible in Ireland; and, besides, Paddy had a friend in the neighhourhood. Justice Harpley stood between him and the law; and woe betide the advocate of justice who dared to question the purity of this worthy magistrate. The king's writ could not run in his district any more than in Cheshire; and this little unpaid had a manner of deciding controverted cases somewhat after that of honest Sancho, except where his prejudices or his interests were concerned-he then decided after a mode peculiar to Ireland.

Justice Harpley was a very satisfactory specimen of an Irish magistrate, some twenty years since. He was a fat, squat, round-about little man; his girth was equal to his altitude; and the dignity of his personal appearance received no assistance from the fashion of his dress. Boots were indispensable, but the indiscriminate application of goose-grease had converted the tops into the sable colour of the legs; although there was no want of cloth in his inexpressibles, they refused all connexion with his vest, and through the aperture thus naturally formed, a fair specimen of home-made linen eagerly obtruded. Justice Harpley was fond of main

taining his ease and his dignity; and, therefore, like the independent aborigines of the South American Pampas, never appeared in public but on horseback. Bacchus astride a barrel was not a more facetious-looking figure than the worthy magistrate when seated on his filly, as he called a mare of some nineteen years old. She evinced as much sagacity as a well-tutored elephant, and seemed to anticipate the wishes of the rider. There were certain houses at which he ought to stop, and here she never failed to come to a stand-still; but her judg ment and kindness were most conspicuous when the Justice happened to have indulged a little too freely in the use, or rather abuse, of potheen. His head was never one of the lightest, and the elevation of spirits generally made him top-heavy. At such times his unmanageable person rolled about like a buoy in a storm, and he must have inevitably fallen, were it not for the management of his filly. With the address of a playhouse juggler she humoured the involuntary motions of her leader; shifted to the right and to the left, and, notwithstanding his sudden jerks and propensity to tumble, contrived, by complying with his personal inclinations, to keep him poised in the saddle.

There are, as a Glasgow surgeon has shown, various degrees of drunkenness; and it was the good fortune of Justice Harpley never to be dead drunk: he always knew, as he said himself, what he was about, and it was creditable to his gratitude that he was not insensible to the good qualities of his mare. Observant of her solicitude to keep him upright, his face was wont to glow with unusual floridness, and his inflated cheeks became more expanded as his mouth assumed the horizontal line of risibility. There was only one thing that could discompose his good humour; any manifestation of disrespect was certain to arouse his anger, and woe betide the peasant who did not, on meeting him, make due obeisance to his magisterial dignity. Six months in jail was but a slight punishment for Paddy's declining to take off his hat.

Though thus occasionally severe, there were some