girl began to cry, and did her best to keep Charley back, but in vain. There happened to be a rent made in the winnowing sheet that day, and out through it went the five persons, followed by the most of the company, and on the comparatively quiet ground in the rear of the tents the duel began, the young girl, the innocent cause of it, staying close in Louis and Edward's neighbourhood, and forgetting to sob in her interest in the progress of the strife. The young Tarquin struck at his foe with fury, but Charley retained his coolness, and received every blow, intended for head, shoulder, or arm, on his well-seasoned shillelah. He was not without making vigorous replies, but his foe had learned and practised the broadsword exercise with basket hilt sticks as well as he, and stroke and ward were vigorously plied, and the sharp clatter of the sticks soon collected a crowd of spectators, who witnessed with much interest and approbation the skilful cudgel-play. At last, Charley, after a cunning feint, rapidly changing the direction of his attack, struck his opponent on the side of the head, and down he went. Edward and Louis and some others now cried out "Enough!" Charley, panting a little, seemed inclined to obey the general feeling, but the levelled champion slowly arose, and though dizzy from the stroke, cried out,"I'm worth three beaten fellows yet," and again renewed the fight with sullen rage. He found serious occupation for Charley's strength and address, till the latter, seizing his opportunity, struck his elbow with an upward sweep of his stick, and dashed his weapon some yards away from his unnerved hand, for a prey to some prowling jackeen. The power of the right arm was now gone, still he furiously rushed to close quarters, but it was only to get a headlong fall from Charley's leg and clenched fist. Just then the young damsel, trembling, but glow

ing with triumph at her champion's success, caught sight of the truant brother. She ran to him and bitterly upbraided him for his neglect. On getting an outline of the late occurrence, he uttered his thanks to Charley, awkwardly and shamefacedly enough. The rescued fair one was not ashamed to show her gratitude, and her hands were cordially pressed by our three friends. The brother was anxious to treat them as well as he knew how, but they declined. They were on the move homeward, and advised him to follow their example. The advice was taken. Our wayfarers, as they proceeded city-wards by Leeson Street road, had the satisfaction of seeing sister and brother following in their wake.

"This adventure," said Louis, as they plodded along the high sidepath, after working their way through the village, "ended more happily than another which I heard from my father as happening to his own knowledge. A young damsel visited the brook in company with a young man of her acquaintance, and did not return home till one or two o'clock in the morning. After she became a mother as well as before, she urged her seducer to have pity on herself and her unhappy babe, but he behaved very unfeelingly towards both. In time he became a counseller in good practice, but she fell lower and lower in the social scale, and her hapless son became the associate of thieves. The counseller happened to be engaged on the part of the crown in a case of burglary, committed with violence to the inmates. The young fellow concerned in the crime was sentenced to be hung, and as his arraigner was about to quit the court, he was informed by his Donnybrook victim that he had got his own son condemned to the gallows. Whether the wretched woman purposely delayed the information for the purpose of torturing her companion in

guilt or not, was unknown to my father. You have read something like this true narrative in the late novel of Paul Clifford.

The subsequent discourse of the three turned on the different duels which had been fought on Donnybrook Green by Bully Egan, of Kilmainham, Lord Mountgarret, Richard Daly, Sir Jonah Barrington, Mr. Crosby, brother to Sir Edward, Counsellor Kelleher, Lord Clare, John Philpot Curran, Lord Norbury, Fighting Fitzgerald, Barney Coyle, the distiller, and the Honourable George Ogle, author of "Molly Asthore." For these, and the surprising escape of Sir Jonah Barrington and Counsellor Byrne, when the well-meant, but ill-timed, manoeuvres of a loyal cobbler and his whisky bottle, put their horses out of their senses, we must refer to the "Stroll over Donnybrook Green," contributed to the DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE for the month of October, 1861, by the present writer. In the paper now before the reader some circumstances, merely glanced at in the former article, are given in detail, and others related for the first time. Taken together, the combined sketches will, as the writer hopes, be

found to contain as much as is pleasant or profitable to be known concerning the old green and its doings.

In the year 1855, ever memorable in the Fasti of Donnybrook, the corporation of Dublin, aided by sundry munificent donations, empowered the Right Honourable Boyce (then Lord Mayor) and Edward Wright, Esq., to purchase the charter, and all its belongings, from the Madden family, for the sum of £3000. Some trouble was, of course, incurred in dispersing the crowds. that would still assemble on the Green in the last week of August. A pitiable shadow of the ancient saturnalia was held for a year or two in a neighbouring paddock, but that was soon abolished, the Green was enclosed and converted into a potatoe field, and no longer were deposits to the sum of fifteen or twenty hundred pounds withdrawn from the Dublin savings banks in the last week of August. Grumblers assert that there has been as much liquor consumed in Dublin and its suburbs any late year as was swallowed during any year of the reign of King Donnybrook. Croakers will croak while the world endures.

COMING

GREAT were the preparations at the little town of Ballymore; which, if the reader is unable to find in a "Gazetteer," we may inform him is inone of the southern counties of Ireland.

Ballymore is rather an improving little town that is to say-thatched roofs are beginning to disappear therein; and and in the place of roughcast houses, with small upper windows and shop - fronts almost as meagre, the inhabitants are developing their architectural tastes into all the refinements of stuccoed walls, plate- glass windows, and grained doors. We call Ballymore a town, because the inhabitants, and the neighbourhood generally, call it so, although it consists but of two streets, diverging from a common point, with a cross-street about halfway, making it take the shape of an A. The local architect who planned and superintended the building of a row of rather neat dwelling-houses, for the humbler classes, in a line parallel to one of the main streets, and who, being a very young man, set up for the wag of the place, is said to have suggested the continuance of this row until another street should have been thereby formed. "Ballymore," he added, in allusion to the shape it would then assume (he always had to explain his joke, which was mortifying), "would then stand A1 in the annals of improvement." This row had been erected at the cost of a number of enterprising inhabitants in the town, who had formed themselves into a building company. A shirt factory had recently been started in their midst,

OF AGE.

and had attracted some families from the country. Until the houses had been built, the old tenements of the town had been fearfully over-crowded, and disease had often broken out in consequence. But the star of Ballymore was now on the ascendant, and progress was the order of the day. The town commissioners had actually sat upon the sewers, pronounced them decidedly offensive, and were about to work prodigies of reform, both in this matter and in that of a fresh-water supply.

If we wished to swell our story to the dimensions of a three-volume novel, we might here, very opportunely, dilate upon the humours of this town, and the people that are therein. But we feel impelled to hurry our tale to a conclusion, and so shall proceed to our more immediate point the preparations in process amongst its principal inhabitants, which were to celebrate the coming of age of the heir to a property, on the confines of which it stood. The fortunate young gentleman in question would, upon the auspicious day which was now so nearly approaching, become the lord of some five thousand acres of landed property, and of rather better than half of this town of two thousand inhabitants. The bulk of the people, both in town and country, were Roman Catholics. The state of agriculture, and of the dwelling ac commodation in the district, was of anything but as promising and advancing a description as the internal condition of the trade of the town— evinced by the markedly improving condition of its architectural exte

rior-would lead one to expect. The farms were small, and the ideas of the farmers as to modern civilisation and the improvements which it brings in its train, were, with a few honourable exceptions, of a very limited description indeed. The estate had been managed, during the fourteen or fifteen years of the minority, by the uncle of the heir, aided by a well-intentioned and efficient agent; but although both of these gentlemen had the reputation of being kind and considerate to the tenantry, this considerateness was rather of such a nature as merely to keep the people from falling back, than of such a nature as to cause them to advance. This regime, however, was a very popular one amongst the farmers, who gloried in their dirt and independence.

Thistles and rag-weeds revelled in their pastures; and though the corn grew thinly enough sometimes upon the worn-out fields, it grew thick upon the rotting thatch of the houses. It was pitiful to see great tracts of meadow land devoted to rushes and moss and flags, all for want of a proper system of drainage, which might have easily been carried out, could all the sinall holders who were interested in it be got to agree to some one joint plan of operations; and it was sad to turn from this unsightly and unprofitable aspect of the fields to the equally unsightly aspect of the cottages, with holes for windows, and only partially whitened walls of mud and rough rubble.

Still the people, on the whole, were by no means in a state of pauperism. The two excellent gentlemen aforesaid were always ready to be easy in the rents with a deserving tenant who had fallen into any temporary difficulty, and to give him a breathing time to recover himself. And if a man had been especially unfortunate through the loss of stock, or through any lengthened sickness of his own, or of any working mem

ber of his family, he might look, not only for "time at the office, but even for a gift of cash in hand to enable him to supply his more pressing wants at seed time, or to purchase a beast.

If, in the main, the crops were far more scanty than they ought to have been under a more advanced system of farming, the people made up for this by the scantiness of their personal needs. Save upon Sundays and holidays, they clad themselves in the most antediluvian of rags. They were most economical in the matter of soap and candles, and darning needles and thread. Their household furniture was almost nil, and their diet was of the plainest and cheapest description. A man who has an income of £75 per annum, and has needs which could not be fully satisfied under £100, is not ast well off as a man who has but £50, and can manage to exist on £45. For the latter is even in a position to save; and such was the position of many of these ten-acre farmers, who had sums of £50, £100, aye, and in one or two cases, a couple of hundreds, to their credit in the local bank. Such were the people over and amongst whom Ernest Fitzgerald was to live as landlord.

The easy regime of his uncle, faithfully carried out by the agent, had its advantages for Ernest. The people were not ready to shoot him the moment he came to live amongst them. "Live and let live," was their motto. They had no objection to a landlordism which let them alone when they were, in their own estimation, "well enough," and at the same time helped them when they needed assistance.

But it was highly problematical whether, when by long usage they had become habituated to this laissez aller style of management, they would not immediately kick at any attempt to deal differently with them, or to improve them in spite of themselves.

Now Ernest was of a very reforming and improving disposition. If he had come into his property when he had all the eagerness and impetuosity of boyhood about him, and at the same time had those ideas of improvement which he now entertained in maturer years, he would probably have run amuck against the people's prejudice in a very short time. But now he had in his favour those additional years which had landed him fairly into manhood; and, beside this, there was now one great charm to ensure him success.

Utterly humiliated, as he felt, from the weakness into which he-who had not a little prided himself (to say the truth) upon his "steadiness" -had so recently fallen; and at the same time full of thankfulness that he had been saved from the dishonouring consequences to the brink of which that weakness had hurried him, he sought comfort in the resolution that he would endeavour to the utmost to atone for his weakness by devoting himself to a life of usefulness. The spirit of love had swelled to great dimensions, and to a mature ripeness in his heart. Although unlawful passion had, in an unguarded moment, entered in, and for that moment obscured the purity of his spirit of love, still that mad impulse had been repented of almost as soon as indulged in. It had, however, had the effect of causing him to make a violent effort to quench a love which, however pure it had been therefore, had led to the possibility of such a result; and his eyes had been opened to the danger of playing with such edged tools. The boiling passion for Minnie had simmered down again into the old quiet regard of the early days at the Vicarage his eyes were now sufficiently opened to see that it would be wickedness to suffer himself to feel more. But the result of this self-control was a craving in his heart for a something on which he might spend the outpourings of affections.

"I will strive to make amends for my sin," he said to himself. "If I must have something to love, let me endeavour to make my estate my mistress, to devote my heart to my tenantry, striving for their welfarerot in any spirit of self-love, not to please my own eye or my own vanity, but from a real desire for their benefit and their advancement. If I can be, under Providence, the favoured means of promoting that benefit and that advancement, I may, perchance, at the same time, be suffered to regain that self-respect which by my own unrestrained impulses and want of self-control, I have now, alas! so nearly lost."

Ernest had not seen Minnie again since he had received her forgiveness that unlucky night. The poor little woman was so much upset by all that she had gone through, coupled with a sense of her own share of the blame, inasmuch as her own yielding heart had, as far as that grave point, given encouragement to her friend's weakness that she had been unable to leave her room the following day. The next day the doctor had to be sent for. She was pronounced to be seriously ill; and when, on the third day, Ernest, according to his previously-arranged plans, had to start for Ireland, he was obliged to do so without being able to bid her good-bye; and, at the same time, with the painful reflection that he had been the cause of her indisposition by the agitation and alarm into which he had thrown her.

On arriving in Ireland he had to stop a few days in Dublin, and then proceeded on his homeward route. Great was his delight upon his arrival at the railway-station which brought him within some seven miles of Ballymore, to receive, from the coachman who awaited him there, a letter from Minnie, amongst a host of other far less interesting documents. This letter assured him, in the first place, of her return to