"Another time I may not have upon the spit a cock o' the mountain, ruddy and lusty as any eagle. You shall have him piping-hot, with his best feather through his nose. Lady Clench gave him me, with a Bologna-sausage, and a note (I would read it you) under. Hams and double-Gloster are plenty. I could tell you too what houses these come from, after dinner: and bright whiskey that widens your nostrils when you smell it, and finds water enough in your mouth for twenty glasses. Honest folks gave me that; who might not like naming. Cocks o' the mountain of another breed; ay, Joe? you live among 'em. Come, stay; we shall dine gloriously. Joe has a voice, and a song for it. Look at the windows of nine houses on each side, when he sings; and you shall see the old women lug the wenches down, and shall catch many a crimped cap and red wrinkle over the blinds." "Hold your wild colt's tongue, Matthew!" said the clergyman, rebuking him privately; and then in a lower tone, "Sure, are not we two enough for a cock o' the mountain, ay, and a sausage as big as a bolster?"

At the commencement of this pastoral charge, Le Doux, finding his arm released, made his escape. At which the brothers, much as one of them had wished his absence, agreed that he was a blackguard and a scamp, and unfit for their society. "Providential!" Joe ejaculated. "You would have talked first about your sausages and cocks o' the mountain and countesses, and then about the whiskey, letting it out by degrees that I had a trifle in the concern. And now, Matthew, about these women. Can't you meet with better and honester? why then I'll lend you a guinea. My sacred word for it, they all make a fool of you; and with more than their husbands; mind that. If you must have such sluts, why then have 'em, in God's name! but prythee be sober-minded and decent; for I am sated and sick of hearing of 'em."

Only one word, Joe!" said Matthew mildly, and interlacing his arm. "Brother Joe now, my life and love! who presented you to that little tight pretty living there of Ennisgalcraig? and what for?" "Stuff!" cried Joseph. "True enough!" said Matthew. "Are you hungry? brother Joe!" Hungry as a wolf-dog." "Give tongue upon the women then another time, and not when you would eat what they send us."

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make so bold as to ask, what do you see in that to chuckle at, ladies and gentlemen? And what made you touch my arm, sir, while I was speaking and had not said the word?"

"Without the slightest idea of offence, I do assure you, captain O'Mara!" said Le Doux; "on the contrary, it was done in my extreme impatience to second you in so just an observation. You were at Paris, I presume: how long did you remain there?"

"A week," replied the captain: "I had taken my lodgings for a whole week, or I should have gone away directly. Our minister there, would you believe it? made a difficulty of presenting me to the king. It was explained to me in that way; although, to do him justice, he only said he should embrace some future opportunity."

"Indeed!" replied Le Doux from his heart, and with an expression of deep sorrow on his countenance. "His Majesty has borne many misfortunes: I hope no one will tell him of this."

I

"I will myself, by the Lord, if ever I go over again, and catch his eye," said the captain, striking the table. "I went on to Italy, and at Florence my lord Burghersh knew better what stuff my coat was made of, and what colour this is. The Granduke treated me like his own son, and came behind my chair at supper, and hoped I might find at table something to my taste. replied to him in Irish; which I had a better right to do than he to speak in French; for Irish is my own language, and French is not his. As there was nothing to be seen at Florence but statues and pictures and other such childish things, I proceeded to Rome, in company with a gentleman who said we must have four horses, if we expected clean linen at the inns. As for clean linen,' said I, 'let those look to it who are to lie in it; for my part I sleep all the way in the coach.' Howsoever, to show him that I did not mind my money, I agreed to the four horses."

"Well, captain," said Lady Glengrin, "what do you think of the fair Italians?" "You smoke me then, my lady, do you? Who told you about it?"

She protested she knew nothing of the matter: he continued. "The whole way from Florence to Siena I thought every girl prettier than the last: for which reason I kept the blinds up, not wishing to understand my fellow-traveller, who declared he suffered so violently by the sun, that he was giddy and could see nothing. On some exclamation of mine, he told me that nearer Rome, on this side of the city, I should not find the females so handsome.

"I do not believe in anything supernatural, excepting a ghost or two; but there are things that puzzle one. I fell asleep from the violent heat, and from the incessant and intolerable noise of a creature they call grillo, against which all the carriage-wheels in Christendom would not defend you: and I did not awake until night. This monkey-faced black devil, of an inch or two in length, with his grill, grill, grill, makes one hotter

than twenty suns could do, bothering and never aisy. We slept at Siena. In the morning, instead of vineyards and cornfields, a vast barren country, cracked by the heat, lay wide open before me. It looked like some starved monster, from whose powerless bones one still wishes one's-self away. No hedge was there, no tree, nor bird of any kind to inhabit them if there had been. I saw no animal but one long snake, lying in the middle of the road. Then again, instead of well-dressed, smiling, beautiful girls, joking with you innocently or wishing you heartily good day, female devils could not be nakeder nor bonier nor uglier than those wenches who ran before us, begging and screaming, and scratching their heads and blade-bones, and writhing like the damned. I remarked it to my companion, who calmly and indifferently answered me, 'I told you so.' 'Were you ever here before, sir?' said I. 'Never,' he replied.

"I trembled. . that is.. not from fear.. but, faith! it almost made me say my catechism in the coach for he threw himself back, as though he had given the order that things should be so, and knew they were so. We entered Rome. He ordered his luggage to remain at the gate, alighted, saluted me; nobody has met him or heard of him; the people at the gate are afraid of saying a word about him if you ask them; never have I seen him from that hour to this, and God forbid I ever should in future."

"You must have been highly gratified, sir, in that city, by the noble specimens of the fine arts," observed the colonel. "O, Lord bless you!" cried the captain, " they make finer lace, and cambric, and frippery of all sorts, in your own country." "We have indeed some pretensions," answered Le Doux. Lady Glengrin remarked to the captain that his noble guest only meant statues and pictures. He winked at her, and whistled in a low key, and then whispered, "Why, indeed they do dress out their old dolls in the churches with a sight of finery, as for that." "But," added Le Doux," their pictures in the Capitol, in the Vatican, and also in many private collections, are master-pieces."

"I do think," replied the captain, "they are up to most of us in painting a face or body. But the devil a notion have they of putting the one in good humour or the other in good clothes. They are all old-fashioned: and most of the men are in dressing-gowns: I have seen some half-naked, and some quite, and others that had never been at the barber's. Then what ruins and rubbish about the demesne! Scythe and whetstone never thought of! More gravel than grain, more mountain than clover-field; and ne'er a potato-plot for love or money. No rich water-meadow; no hay-stack nor turf-stack; no tight little cabin, with its window kept nicely in repair with strong substantial paper, and the smoke curling neatly through the doorway over the back of a comfortable pig, black or yellow, blinking at it pleasantly. But I will tell you what there are instead. There are rotten trees, and blighted and blasted ones. There are

broken-up roads; you would swear at first sight that they lead to no magistrate's or grand-juryman's. There are ugly broad weeds just before you; and farther on there are cranky old towers covered with pantiles; and there are rivers that are suffered to go undermining them. In all those pictures I never saw a cow fit for the butcher, or a horse that had been groomed, or a sheep with wool about her too good to wipe my boots on. Plenty of goats: but who likes their company? Gentlemen's houses seem quite deserted. Where do you find a hot-house? where do you find a garden-wall? By my soul! I think the best painter in the whole set would fight shy of a gooseberry bush."

Lady Glengrin then asked the captain whether he had been presented to the Pope.

"As soon as I had put on a clean shirt, and got my boots blacked, I went," said he, " to Cardinal Gonsalvi, as the shoeblack told me I should, and desired to be presented to his master: he recommended me to a countryman of mine, father Taylor, who did it."

"The cardinal is a man of great politeness and extensive information," said Le Doux.

"Politeness enough," replied the captain; "but information is another thing. The devil a word of English or Irish had he to throw at a dog; and when I tried him at Latin, by my soul! not a syllable could he put down to it, although it is in the breviary; which I borrowed on purpose to learn it, from the waiter."

"Did you try the Pope at it, captain?" said Lady Glengrin.

Madam," after a pause answered he, "I beg your pardon, but it is uncivilish to speak to a lady with a leg of a turkey in limbo between the gullet and grinder. Now then at your service. I told his Holiness I hoped I had the pleasure of seeing him very well, drawing up my pantaloon, and putting my hand at ease in the fob, like a man of fashion. The Pope knows all languages under heaven, they tell me, but he did not hear me at first, and when my words were repeated to him in Italian by my countryman, he replied, with a smile as hearty as mine, that he was always well in the presence of worthy men, and that he suffered as little as, could be expected from his age and infirmities. He continued to smile upon me for a moment when he had done, and then said something quite as obliging to another, who had made no inquiries after his health at all. My free noble Milesian manner gave general satisfaction: people were surprised to see how easily and spiritedly I did it: and an English lady was encouraged to ask him for a lock of his hair, not wishing to be outdone by an Irishman."

"Did he give it her?" asked lady Glengrin. "He could not well have made any woman jealous; yet he thought he might; and said gravely that after his death those who esteemed him might wish for such memorials, but that he could not give them, in the grave or out. He seemed to be much affected at the mention of

dying, and went away. The English lady was vexed and angry, and said aloud, 'A stiff old prig! I would not give a farthing for it.' Nobody applauded her: women and men looked in her face coldly and fixedly. I began to feel for her; and to show her that I did, I told her, if she drove that way it should go hard with me but I gave her a lock of as good a man's. She stared at me as if she doubted my word. Upon which, to lend her confidence, I said, ' By my soul, miss, I say only what I mean; and you shall cut it your own sweet self.' In spite of everything I could think of to pacify her, away she went, with old Holiness sticking in her gizzard: and the last words she uttered were 'The horrid brute!' Now I do not think the offence she received from him warranted so fierce an expression."

Le Doux had offered many little attentions to the lady next him, from whom he sometimes had an answer, but often none. At last she was tired and impatient, and said to a girl on the other side of her, giving her an elbow-kick, "Christ Jesus! Bess, how this outlandish man does plague and worry me! Lord Almighty! will he never let me eat?"

Le Doux either did not hear or dissembled it: but the captain, who heard it plainly, was not aware of this, and said, "Let her alone, colonel ! old cats will grumble over their meat, and mean nothing. If you intend civility, she is only my sister; you need not mind her; ay, Teresa?"

"I am as much to be minded as another, Phelim. Who soused you that sow's ear? There's no bacon where there's nobody to salt it. Mind that, and munch genteeler."

Universal approbation succeeded, excepting from lady Glengrin, who neither uttered a word nor changed a feature. Le Doux declared that the lady was in the right; and that he himself was the only person to blame; no correction, he added, could make him moderate his attentions, to wit, spirit, and beauty.

"Lord! he speaks as good English as the dean," exclaimed the pacified Teresa to her younger friend," and when one does not eat, one can listen. Mind him he is not so old as he seems he may be forty."

ear;

"A fig for men of forty!" said the other in her " and I do not much like him neither; for his nails are white all the way down, more like a beast's than a Christian's."

The last of these words were interrupted by a violent noise in front of the house; then at the door; then within it. Chairs rattled; imprecations and expostulations clashed, thickened, redoubled.

"Now for fun!" cried the captain, wiping first his hands with his whiskers, and then rubbing them together in raptures. "But better after our wine.. Moyle, run out and tell them to wait. Lady Glengrin, a thousand to one, among the rebels I find the fellow who stole your peacock, or some of his kin." I hope, captain, if you do," replied her ladyship, "you will lay the lash on him smartly."

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"Have you so many thieves about you, captain?" said Le Doux. "These, and three hundred thousand more of them," cried he. "We will whip them howsoever, till we find them out."

"What can so many steal?" asked Le Doux. “Steal!” replied the captain, "the thieves for the most part steal nothing: but nine in ten of the whole population are rebels! bloody dogs! fiery-hot papists as any in hell, enemies to church and king, tithe and orange! sly Scotch Presbyterians, earthed here! fellows who cry out so at the sight of a steeple, one would think you had poked it into the hollow tooth. I have flogged them myself until I have a rheumatism in my shoulder that will last me for life, and until there is a dearth of wire and honest hemp in all the midland parts of the country."

"You seem indeed to have been in active service," said Le Doux. "I have flogged this coat upon my back, and five hundred a year into my pocket: I shall be major next Christmas, and die commander of a district. These things are not given for nothing."

"From your enthusiasm in your profession, you must have entered it early in life." "I was in the midst of the rogues at the outset." "You remember then the attempt of the revolutionary French and of lord Edward Fitz-Gerald."

"O yes; I was then but a boy though. Often and often has he lifted me above his head, although I was as tall at ten as he was at thirty. He used to say, when people told him to take care of him. self, that he had not an enemy that he knew or that knew him. Yet he found one here in Ireland who could do his business. He was such a merry, innocent, ingenuous little devil, he could fidget a man's wife before his face, and no blood and hounds upon it, nor spit nor spade nor shillelah. And yet somehow he was the mischiefullest imp of all father Satan's fire-side. Had he lived a couple of years, we should have had barefoot bishops and woollen epaulets; no army; all militia; from bog to parade, from parade to bog; singing and whistling, as who should care for any; and it would have been a month's labour to lift a hat. We have United Irishmen in every county and township; and by my soul! if he had carried his plans into execution, we should have had none at all, at all, but United Irishmen. Our people will always be bad when they can be, sir!"

An Englishman corroborated the observation by the words, "I believe it." At which the captain rose from his chair, and asked him what he meant by speaking ill of Ireland in his presence, which he swore no man should do while he had Irish blood in his veins.

"Nevertheless they are most incorrigible rogues," said lady Glengrin, remarking the silence and sorrowfulness of Le Doux.

"The vulgar are subject to error," said he, "and in these matters even the wise. Possibly your ladyship may find among them some who aspired to your countenance by participating your opinions on civil liberty."

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"Lord help you, O'Mara!" said Moyle, sneer

"A dirty pagan! a dirty pagan!" cried she. "Because your Honour would not let a scurvy lieutenant come to table among the quality! "What! forsooth!' said the polecat, 'if the daughter of mother Jibbery is become a countess and picks her teeth here, am not I good enough to lift my jacket-flap upon the chair beside her?' 'No, you are not,' said I. 'Then,' said he, 'no suckingpig for countess or captain this blessed day;' and, .. O the foul fox! with a devil in him from muzzle to brush.. how do you think he began to baste the poor innocent?"

"Hold hard!” cried Mr. Roger Moyle. "Have you no decency, Tertulliana Trench?"

Decency! the cockroach! I could skin him like an eel, out of the Suire, alive alive. No roast pig to-day, by my salvation, as I am true to the Protestant ascendancy, unless your Honour spits the bloody traitor."

"Let me alone for that," said the captain calmly: "I shall see whether his ribs will crackle, and whether he has a handful of thyme and marjoram in his belly."

At this he said grace and would have risen; but Le Doux took him by the hand, and pressing it between his, submitted to his sounder judgment whether so trifling a matter were worthy of his exalted courage. The captain would have argued in the affirmative.

"Pooh! pooh!" said Moyle humanely, "the man was drunk; and drunken men are up to anything, pretty nearly; arn't they, Miss?" She lifted up her shoulder, and said impatiently, "Let Phelim go his way. Sure we shall have a witty song from Tommy Moore upon it, ringing on the piano from Dublin to Belfast."

"Then let the whelp have both pig and fire for his own share!" exclaimed the captain: "I would rather be in a jail than in a song; and that witster's are never out of tune or out of fashion. Beside, we had all done with eating; and as for sucking-pigs, I know where the other seven are. But, right or wrong, I have something to say in Master Ralph's ear another time, for his ill manners, and that won't lie like cotton in it, take my word."

The bottle was then pushed round; and it was announced to the ladies by the captain that they might sit where they were, as no smutty toasts

wave the cap along the ground where the scent lies fainter round cover."

In despite of invitations and precautions the party broke up early in the evening.

Lady Glengrin had alike sustained her dignity and her affability, and told the captain she did not wonder he was such a favourite at the castle. Her attendant, Lord Purlingstreamdale, was loftier: He looked hard, and did not hear Mr. Roger Moyle invite him across the table to drink a glass of claret. Mr. Roger Moyle appeared not to notice it at the time; but when they rose from table he took him gently by the sleeve, and reminded him of it plaintively, in almost a whisper, saying he did not expect it at his hands, having left no less than eighty pounds for five weeks together in his father's bank, when his bailiff Sampson Haft sold the bullocks at Crookhaven. His lordship looked disdainfully.

"I am sorry you look so strange and modest and red, my lord," said Mr. Roger Moyle, "as there is a sort of kin between us."

"How so, Mr. Moyle?" said his lordship.

"Why sure then," replied Mr. Roger Moyle, "and was not my father's kitchen-wench, poor Phillis, who died at eighty under my roof, own sister to Moll Harness, your grandmother, whom your grandfather, if he had lived, would have made an honest woman; for there was not one that scoured better nor harder in those parts, pewter or brass, though Phillis was never slack.. No drawing up before me! no waistcoat-button against mine! I know your height without tape. I have some stray acres, my Lord Purlingstreamdale, and, if you beat for me, you may know where they lie, and where the house lies upon 'em; there's ne'er a tree hides it; it looks you in the face of day, erect and blithe as a bridegroom." Then, offering his hand, "Come let us part friends, or we shall not sleep soundly; to-morrow every man to his fancy." He stooped a little, and rubbed his palms. as men do before a good fire on coming from the cold, and, in higher spirits than before, ran to the carriage, the steps of which Lady Glengrin was about to mount, and invited her ladyship and Colonel Le Doux to Moylestown, where he told them he had dogs and some dirt for them if the weather should hold. They laughed heartily and drove off.

"Lord Purlingstreamdale, you do not enjoy Moyle's wit," said Lady Glengrin.