tramp of the bespattered and reeking saddle-horse, and the lumbering rattle of the car which brought its load of corn (stacked until now, the season of scarcity) to the store of the small dealer, a sort of Lilliputian merchant, who made a new profit by shipping, or rather boating the grain to the next trading city. The fronts of the inns and shebeens were screwed up, and the rooms made ready for the temporary convenience of petty jurors, summoned from the furthermost limits of the county; strong farmers anxiously looking for the success of their road presentments; Palatines seeking compensation for burnt hayricks and out-houses, fired by the hand of the ubiquitous Whiteboy; rural practitioners demanding the legal grant for the support of a dispensary; middlemen in the commission of the peace, eager to curry favour with the mighty sojourners by the number and the importance of their committals; gray-coated rustics, who had come up to town to stand by a friend and relation, whose black-thorn perhaps had been a little too fatal among the neighbours at the last fair; country gentlemen willing to show off as lords of the scene, and ambitioning a niche on the grand jury list; and last-and first and best, young and blooming speculators of another order, armed with as many terrors, bent up to as fatal a purpose, and with as fair and philosophical a principle for their motive, as that which governed the awful sword-bearers of the law itself.

The concourse of in-comers on this occasion was more numerous than usual, a circumstance readily accounted for by the singular case which was to be decided during the ensuing week. All intercourse with the prisoner was interdicted, and even his daughter, in order to retain the permission, which had in the first instance been granted her, of attending to her father's wants in person, was obliged to restrict her own movements to the limits of the prison.

A calm, breathless morning beheld the small fishing

smack in which Aylmer had taken his passage for the town, drop her peak in the small inlet which glided by the village of Blennerville, a kind of pigmy outport to the larger, or capital town. Nothing could be in more perfect accordance with the state of the voyager's mind, than the scene which was presented to his eyes when the loud call of the boatman summoned him on deck. The air, as before mentioned, was perfectly still and breathless, and the clear sunless serenity of a spring forenoon rested on the landscape. On his left hand lay a flat champaign of grayish marl, covered with numbers of sea-birds, who were busily angling in the little inequalities of the plain for the juniors of the scaly tribe, deserted by the tide in its retreat. Between him and the ocean, this marl or sand elevated itself into mounds of so considerable an altitude, as to leave only an occasional shimmering of the mighty sea without visible between their obtunded summits. On the right hand the bleak and barren chain of mountains, which form the distance of the Killarney scenery on the other side, rose suddenly in abrupt masses, to a height which left the southern prospect entirely to the imagination, and threw an air of softened gloom and solitude around the handsome villas, which were scattered over the richly wooded and improved country at their base. The faint hum of the little town, in the distant inland, the twittering of the early swallow, the cry of the red-shank, the occasional wild scream of the horse-gull, the whistle of the curlew, and the soft and plaintive cry of the green plover, all heard singly, and at long intervals, formed a fitting accompaniment to the scene, unless when the report of a shoregun, directed by the murderous eye of some fustian-clad prowling duck-shooter on the coast, reverberated like a thunder-peal among the echoes of the mountain, and filled the air with a thousand whirring wings, and cries of terror and reproach. Above the little bridge of Blennerville, a group of boys stood knee-deep in the stream which

flowed from the town, groping for "flukes", while their occasional exclamations of success or disappointment, sounded as distinctly in Aylmer's ear as if they had been uttered by his side. Toward the offing of the little inlet, the drooping sails of the sloops and cutters, the sluggish heaving of the bulky ocean, and the jeering of the wits and master-spirits of the different crews, as they sat dangling their legs over the sides of their vessels, formed no unworthy balance to the inland portion of the picture.

"The two tin-pinnies, ye'r honour ?" said the boatman, touching his hat, as Aylmer, with the privileged abstraction of melancholy, was turning off in the direction of the town, forgetful of his fare. Having rectified his error entirely to the satisfaction of the other party, he pursued his way to the town, which lay about a mile distant.

The flourishing of trumpets and the trampling of many feet, announced to him as he entered the suburbs of the place, that the judges were already on their way to the court. As he hurried along the crowded street, obstructed in his career by persons as eagerly bent to accomplish the same end as himself, he fell in with a scene which presented as singular a contrast to that which he had just been admiring, as his imagination could possibly have anticipated. The rushing of the anxious multitude in various directions, the rattling of outside jaunting-cars, empty turf-kishes, and grand jury men's decayed and mud covered carriages, the clattering of brogues and horsehoofs, the shouting of one party at the release of a clansman from the clutches of the law, the shrieking and cursing of another group, who saw in the drooping head and manacled hands of an equally valued kinsman the fearful announcement of a contrary judgment, the warwhoop of a drunken faction-leader, as he made an effort to caper in the air and wheel his seasoned black-thorn above his head, the yelping of dogs, the squalling of children, the shrill remonstrances of shrewish mothers, the yet

more hideous tones of a steam-engine ballad-singer, whose awful lungs, victorious over the frantic uproar about him, made most distinctly audible the burden of a song on the woes of the then existing colonial war:

"And they powering down their chain balls for to sweep our min away,

O wasn't that a could riciption in the North of Americay?"

alternated now and then, in compliment to the naval portion of his auditory, to the more popular doggrel of,

"A sailor courted a farmer's daatur,

Who lived convanient to the Isle of Man".

These, superadded to the ordinary bustle of the town, formed a combination of sounds that would, had he been present, have qualified Old Morose for Hoxton; and would have sounded strangely in the ears of an election assessor, a common councilman, an M. P., or a writer of

overtures.

It was past noon when Aylmer, after bustling his way through the narrow purlieus of the place, found himself placed in the centre of a small, low-roofed, ill-lighted, dingy court, on one side the bench, from which at that moment the final sentence of the law was issuing; on the other the dock, over the bar of which leaned two or three squalid looking, pale-faced creatures, listening with a stare of wildered abstraction to the announcement of their fate. The benches at either side were covered with counsel in blue frock-coats and coloured handkerchiefs, the usual forensic insignia being treated with philosophical indifference on a provincial circuit. In a small gallery at one end Aylmer witnessed an infraction of the inviolable rules of Irish female decorum, the presence of a woman among the audience of a court of justice. She seemed sensible herself of the singularity of her position, for her face and person were completely enveloped in a hood and

cloak, and the place she occupied was the most unobtrusive that could have been selected.

"So the bills have been found against Cahil Fitzmaurice?" said a voice at Aylmer's side.

"Aye, have they, then", was the reply, "and it's the next on the list. It's a droll* story: they say Counsellor- has instructions to call up young Aylmer, in regard of a ghost appearing to him, and telling him the whole tote, by which token he drew the confession out of the old man next morning. It was a quare thing. They say young Aylmer thrun holy-water on the sperit, but it did not mind that no more than the devil would a parson, until he threatened it with the sacrament, when it flew up through the roof in a sheet of flame as big as a bonefire of a St. John's Eve".

A whisper now passed from the clerk of the crown to the judge, and was subsequently transmitted to the turnkey, who bowed and put himself in motion, The little grating at the far end of the dock was thrown open, and the rush which took place in the court showed that all present anticipated the meaning of the order. Heads were thrust out, and eyes strained from their sockets to catch the first glimpse of the aged prisoner.

The slow and uncertain footstep at length sounded on the boarded ascent leading from the prison, and the form of the accused emerging from the gloom of the outer dock, was in a short time presented to the gaze of the multitude. The old man bowed as he took his place, and passing his hand once or twice over his eyes to relieve them from the influence of the strong light which fell immediately around him, he remained passively awaiting his fate. Although he had been prepared to expect a considerable change in the appearance of his old guardian, Aylmer experienced a shock when he first looked upon his face and person, which contributed very materially to shake his conviction of the