*

mansion. The partition appeared to be composed of hard slane-turf, which in its smooth coat of mortar and whitewash, had escaped the eyes of inquisitive housewives for a succession of lustra, until this unfortunate demolition of the outworks had taken place. On the first occasion for an immediate supply of firing, which subsequently occurred, Sandy sent his right leg through the partition, and furnished his hearth from the breach, to which he often afterwards recurred, although a bog lay within twenty perches of the house, declaring that "the ould wall burned like coal". The breach was at present stopped with a dismantled door of an inner room. "No matter!" thought Aylmer, as he plunged his puckered-up, grinning face into the basin of biting cold water, "these things shall be mended when I take the management of the place into my own hands”.

As he proceeded in the act of purification, he perceived that his own clothes had been removed from the apartment, as he concluded, for the purpose of being dried; and a suit perfectly strange to him, both from its fashion and its material, was laid across the lofty back of a huge oaken chair in their stead. It consisted of a blue jacket and trowsers bagging toward the ankle in sailor fashion, both closely studded with gilt buttons, strung in rows wherever buttons were admissible, and altogether having a great deal more the air of venerable age, both in their cut and texture, than fell in very lovingly with the modern taste of the young student. He put them on, however, in default of better, and was not a little surprised to find himself as exactly fitted as if they had been cut for himself, and upon scientific principles ". As he concluded his toilet, he recognized, through the breach, the voice of his old companion, Sandy, crooning over an old fox-hunting ditty, as he sat in the chimney corner, addressing, between

66

* So called to distinguish it from hand turf; the one being cut from the soil with an instrument called a slane, the other shaped with the band out of a soft boggy stuff, which is afterwards dried.

occasional bars of the melody, sundry conjectures to his mother on the probable issue of Aylmer's return:

"Good morrow, Fox ".-"Good morrow, sir",

"Pray what is that you're ating?

"A fine fat goose I stole from you:
Pray, will you come and taste it?"
"Niel flash e piuc

Niel niesh e giub,

Indeed I will not taste it;

But I promise you, you'll sorely rue
That fine fat goose you're ating!"

"

"Eh, mother! O holy saints, protect an' save us ! look there!" cried Sandy, starting from his place, and crossing, with a face expanded in wonder and awe, to his mother, as Aylmer suddenly entered the kitchen, and confronted him. The old woman, turning her hung-beef countenance over her shoulder, seemed to catch the alarm from her son, and flung her withered arms round his neck for protection, while her smoky eyes continued bent on the astonished youth.

"Hooee! Alilu-war-yeh! Sandy, dear! O, murther! 'Tis it that's there!"

""Tis himself, all out!" roared Sandy.

"The liven imidge!" said Ally.

"Jest as if it stept out o' the pictur frame, down! A sperrit, no less!"

"An the hair! an the eyes! an the whole tote! It bates cock-fighten!"

"My good people", said Aylmer, as soon as he had sufficiently recovered his surprise to cut short the torrent of their ejaculations, "this may be very amusing to you and very flattering to me, for aught I know; but would you be kind enough to explain what it is in my person that sets you roaring, and kicking, and plunging up in a corner that way?-eh?"

"Thu! thu-thu-thu! 'Tis master Will, then, bim

self after all!" said Ally, clacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as is usual among the peasant Irish, when they wish to express surprise, compassion, or perplexity. After a little time, he was enabled to gather the occasion of their sudden alarm. The clothes which he wore, and which, after a great deal of rummaging among old chests, presses, and worm-eaten wardrobes, were discovered by Ally in an inner apartment, belonged in times past to his father, and helped to strengthen the natural likeness of the son into an almost deceptive similitude.

"Indeed, it's a burning shame for me to mintion it, Master Will, darling", said Ally, as she laid before him his breakfast of fresh eggs, butter, jelly, smooth-coated potatoes, and virgin-white milk; "but I could'nt get a taste o' tay high nor low. But av we have you here tomorrow, there'll be a keeler o' the beestings*-a trate you hadn't in the 'cademy, I'll be your bail. Indeed, Sandy and meself are trusting now a long while to the milk o' one stripper; as Mr. Fitzmaurice says we musn't lay a wet finger on the little Kerry cows that fill the firkins for your ixpences behind up. Troth, as I tell Sandy, I think it's in the cows horns it do be going from us", etc. etc., etc.

While this chat and a great deal more equally edifying and imaginative, was gliding forth from between the old herdswoman's lips, the person addressed was very sagaciously employed on the viands which she had set before him, and so vigorously did he exert himself, that long before Ally thought of discontinuing her harangue of mingled welcomes, and praises, and moanings, and complaints, he cut it short by declaring his intention of setting off immediately for his guardian's house, where, as he rightly calculated, it was probable his baggage had arrived before now.

*The first milk of a cow immediately after her accouchement is called beestings in Ireland; and dressed in a peculiar way, is considered a delicacy there.-Tastes vary.

It was too cold a morning to think a great deal of love, and yet, as Aylmer took his way over the crisp and frosty meadows that lay between him and the residence of the Fitzmaurices, he could not avoid renewing his conjectures as to the probable effect of time on the frame and mind of his fair play-fellow, and repeatedly putting the silent question to his heart, whether he should now seriously fail in love, or no. Capitulation, on such occasions, is a very usual consequence of parley; but as this happens to be one of those situations of the heart (so useful to a story-teller), in which the reader is kind enough to find novelty and entertainment even in repetition, just as one thinks the dinner-bell, at forty years of age, sounds quite as sweetly as it did at ten, there can be no great harm in following the steps of the deliberator through all the gradations of his defeat. His spirit warmed within him, in spite of the season, as he saw the smoke curling off in the light blue masses (it is turf smoke we speak of, gentle London reader) from the chimneys of Kilavariga house (those classical names are destructive to all sentiment), every stone, and brick, and tile, and crink, and cranny of which were as familiar to his memory as the shape of his nose or the colour of his hair. There was the great avenue gate, on which Kate and himself, when relieved from the stern constraint of their guardian's eye, were wont to indulge in a fine romping bout of swinging, and riding, and shouting, and screaming, and laughing; and which, if the truth must be told, was the scene of many a serious battleroyal between the pair, so far as that fray could be called a battle, in which all the offence lay on the feminine side. Stepping over the stile on one side of the closed entrance, a greater number of remembrancers of the olden time started up before him—the haggard (Irish-English for hayyard), behind the stacks of which they had played many a merry game of hoop, and hide and seek; the little pond, on which they had launched their green flag boats, and

cheered them as they skimmed over the surface, with as keen, and, certainly, quite as philosophical an interest, as the speculators of the T. Y. C. matches on the banks of Father Thames. Leaving all these sweet stimulants of memory behind him, however, Aylmer approached the dwelling of the still sweeter being to whom they were indebted for more than half their interest. As he crossed the lawn, his eyes fixed on the window of the parlour, which (not the gentle instinct of affection, though we would fain assert it, but) his memory told him was her appointed place of work, of study, and of elegant amusement, he saw the light muslin blind withdrawn for an instant, and a fair face, with hair clustering about it, in papers, like ripening grapes, just showed itself, and "vanished, like a shooting star". The blind was re-adjusted, and Aylmer beheld nothing further of the inmates of Kilavariga, until he had applied himself to the brazen knocker of the halldoor. It was opened almost instantly by (not the dear hand which his throbbing heart had led him to anticipate, but) the more robust and substantial one of Norry, the "getter up of small linen to the establishment.

Those who saw Norry on her return to the kitchen, averred that there were, in the heightened colour of her cheek and the sparkle of her eye, tokens of a welcome on her part, and a greeting on Aylmer's, a little more Irish than the lady of the house might have been pleased to witness-but this is none of our business. Aylmer hurried on, with a pulse throbbing in the tumultuousness of expectation, into the parlour, but he found no one there, although the disposition of the furniture showed him that it had been very recently abandoned by its mistress. The slight feeling of disappointment which this seeming coldness and tardiness gave occasion to was quickly removed, however, by the appearance of two or three curl-papers, dropped near the pier-glass. Aylmer smiled most roguishly and impudently, as he stooped to pick one up; but he was properly