pleted the sale of all his little stock in trade, and, with a last look round the spot where he had passed some months of struggling poverty, out we sallied into the town.

"We'll breakfast at Jonathan Hone's," said Santron. "It's the first place here. I'll treat you to rump steaks, pumpkin pie, and a gin twister that will astonish you. Then, while I'm arranging for our passage down the Hudson, you'll see the hospitable banker, and tell him how to forward all his papers, and soforth, to the settlement, with your respectful compliments and regrets, and the rest of it. "But am I to take leave of them in this fashion?" asked I.

"Without you want me to accompany you there, I think it's by far the best way," said he, laughingly. "If, however, you think that my presence and companionship will add any lustre to your position, say the word and I'm

ready. I know enough of the barber's craft now to make up a head en Puritan,' and, if you wish, I'll pledge myself to impose upon the whole colony."

Here was a threat there was no mistaking; and any imputation of ingratitude on my part were far preferable to the thought of such an indignity. He saw his advantage at once, and boldly declared that nothing should separate

us.

"The greatest favour, my dear Maurice, you can ever expect at my hands is, never to speak of this freak of yours; or, if I do, to say that you performed the part to perfection."

My mind was in one of those moods of change when the slightest impulse is enough to sway it, and more from this cause than all his persuasion, I yielded; and the same evening saw me gliding down the Hudson, and admiring the bold Kaatskills, on our way to New York.

SOME seventy or eighty years ago, there resided in the barony of Carbery, a squire of the name of O'Sherkin.

The barony of Carbery! quoth some one—and where on earth is Carbery?

Mercy on us! exclaims that worthy soul, Miss Peggy Bustlebody, who for five-and-thirty consecutive years, has occupied a logemen in the principal street of Clonakilty;-said logemen having a bow window commanding a prospect in one direction as far as the post office, and on the other side bounded by the turn in the street just at the grocer's, and including the coach and jingle office, and the turn to the market-place-no bad gazabo for one who likes to see the world, and what's passing in it. Mercy on us!!!!!! (observe we put six notes of admiration to it)-Don't know where Carbery is! Why the very crows that build in the woods at Myross know Carbery! Only think of any human craythur not knowing where Carbery is !!!!!

Leaving excellent Miss Bustlebody to her notes of admiration-the barony of Carbery, as the whole universe knows, except the above ignorant individual, for whose sole enlightenment

we condescend to answer the question -is an extensive district in the western part of the county of Cork; and boasts as its metropolis or centre of commerce and fashion, the delightful city of Skibbereen-la Superba-as the Italians say of Genoa. The barony is for the most part hilly, rocky, and mountainous; abounding in turf bogs; and with sundry picturesque bays opening from, and headlands extending into the Atlantic ocean; the "Carberiæ Rupes" of Dean Swift, who has made mention of them in some flat, prosaic, schoolboy-like verses, which, however, are treasured and celebrated as a relic of the witty Dean of St. Patrick's. Swift was no poet.

In this famous barony, Barnaby O'Sherkin, Esquire, had his residence. It was the remains of an old mansion, which preserved, even in decay, an ap. pearance of respectability. A few ancestral trees were grouped about the house; giving to the place, as contrasted with the dreary poverty of the surrounding scenery, the appearance of an oasis in the desert. It was situated a few miles from the distinguished city above-mentioned, on a farm of a few

hundred acres, the remant of a vast extent of rock and bog, over which the ancestors of Mr. O'Sherkin had, some centuries before, presided in the capacity of princes, kings, or the Lord knows what; and which had, excepting the remnant aforesaid, long since passed into other ownership. The dilapidated house, half of a ruined stable, a kitchen garden, a huge turf-stack, a colossal dunghill, and two tall piers flanking a gateway the interval occupied by a heap of stones instead of a gate-were the principal objects that struck the eye of a visitor to Castle Sherkin, as this ancient seat of that illustrious race was named. The landscape around was not without features of remarkable beauty. The distant ocean, islands rising like mountains from the water, a picturesquely-indented coast, and the heights of Crookhaven and Mount Gabriel, presented to the eye objects more pleasing than the wretched farms and mud cabins of the foreground.

Amid all this apparent misery, however, the squire passed his time, from one end of the year to the other, in great jollity-fox-hunting on a small scale, gossip on the roads, and lounging in the street of Skibbereen, where for hours together, with any chance acquaintance, or with farmers and nondescript idlers, his hands in his breeches pockets, and his back to a door-post, he would stand joking, and prating, and looking wise about nothing. These occupations whiled away the days of Mr. Barny O'Sherkin, as they had those of his ancestors, time out of mind.

They slept, these ancestors of his, in a neighbouring churchyard. "Poor fellows," as Mr. O'Sherkin would say of them, "they were fine chaps in their time. Arrah, but if the family had its rights, they'd be all of 'em lords and princes now, instead of myself livin' on this few poor ould acres here. But I think nothin' goes right in Ireland.”

By what process of political logic Mr. O'Sherkin made out satisfactorily to his reason, that if his family had its rights its defunct generations would start to life with coronets on their heads, we are unable to say; but it was a matter of Irish politics; and the world are aware of the fact that Irish politics are different from all other politics. As little are we able to affirm by what ingenious process he arrived at the conclusion that a tract of rock

and bog, which in past ages had belonged to a certain clan or set of persons of the name of O'Sherkin ought, amid the fluctuations of an unsettled state of society, to have descended without interruption to their lineal progeny; while in all other countries lands have changed proprietors over and over again. But, as we have already said, Irish politics are—Irish politics.

Like the rest of mankind, the squire had his little rubs, quarrels, and mishaps. Not that they were little to him; on the contrary, each of them, severally, for the time being, occupied the entire of his heart, soul, and mind. Still he was, on the whole, too goodhumoured to retain anger long, however he might roar and bellow, under the immediate pressure of some contretemps or other, on which occasions he would roar with a vengeance. Dennis M'Cash, his caretaker and sense-carrier, was wont to say of him :-" Och! then, 'tis the masthur has the fine voice entirely! Wisha, but as you stand in the fair field at Skibbereen, you may hear him scouldin' the people up at Castle Sherkin, when they do be crassin' his honour."

He had not fought many duels; had horsewhipped not very many of the peasantry; had seldom a sixpence of his own; and was considered to be as good-natured, honest, kind-hearted, excellent, worthy a fellow as ever lived.

Nothing could be merrier than the spectacle presented in his little parlour on a winter's evening, when, after a day spent in riding and hallooing over bog and ditch after a small pack of harriers, kept by a club of which he was president, he would assemble a knot of congenial spirits at his hospitable board. The cloth removed; his wife and daughters retired; a blazing fire; claret, whiskey, lemons, sugar; an enormous kettle of hot water; a regular set to-fun, stories, joking, and roars of laughter-wasn't it a scene on which Bacchus might have looked with envy! Then came singing all sorts of songs, and talking all together, and sentimentalising, and getting glorious a paradise-at least a Scandinavian paradise-of which they retained no distinct recollection the next morning, when-how did they get there?— they found themselves not in paradise, but-three in a bed, and with splitting headaches.

It was a fine afternoon in the month of April, and Mr. O'Sherkin was slowly riding homewards, after a day's lounge in Skibbereen. He had experienced in the course of the day sundry adventures, whereof the memories were gamboling in his noddle; each crotchet, as it entered his cranium, assuming the port of a giant-the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth-till the said giant was shoved out by the next comer, a giant likewise, and to be similarly disposed of in its turn. For Mr. O'Sherkin, like sundry his fellowcreatures, was capable of entertaining but one idea at a time; and decidedly, by the laws of perspective, moral, physical, or intellectual, that object which fills the eye, and there is eye physical, eye moral, and eye intellectual, that object is, pro tempore, a giant. A sixpenny bit covering the eye seems bigger than the distant Chimborazo, or than the firmament of heaven.

The road along which Mr. O'Sherkin wended his way was an up-and-down, primitive sort of affair, which would make a disciple of Telford or Macadam stare in speechless astonishment, at least if he heard it called a road. It looked as if the reasoning and designing faculties of man had had no part in its construction. In one place, the line was carried straight up the steep side of a great hill, to a prodigious height, and straight down again at the other; though at the base of the hill there was ground level, or nearly so, on which, with a little design and contrivance, a very excellent road might have been laid out. One while, it mounted an almost perpendicular precipice; here, it was intersected, and partly washed away by mountain torrents; and anon it traversed a fearfully-narrow and broken architectural fragment, 'yclept a bridge, which, for the last twenty years, was always about to be mended; and from which the least slip would send the traveller, bag and baggage, either into a huge bog-hole on one side, or among a chaos of stones, water, mud, and titanic fragments of rock on the other; a locale very interesting, no doubt, to a geologist, with hammer in hand, and broad daylight around him; but not particularly pleasant to the luckless wight who, on a dark winter's night, amid a tremendous tempest of

VOL. XXXVII.-NO. ccxx.

wind and sleet, should find himself and his vehicle suddenly capsized therein: and instead of the merry fireside which he had left, or comfortable home to which he was hastening, should anticipate passing a night like that so poetically described by Ossian,-" Alone, forlorn on the hill of storms !"—but with the unpoetical episodes of a broken leg, a contused skull, a shattered buggy, and a disabled horse. The surface of the road was as rough and broken as the undefended influences of nature for years, the seasons, wind and rain, frost, snow, and thaw, and the wintry swelling of mountain streams, could make it. The meditations of our squire as he bumped along its stones and declivities, might be expressed in words as follows:

"Wisha, then, but bad luck to the sowl of Ned Bawn, to go offer me such a price for that pig. As illigant a pig as you'd see from this to Clanakilty; and worth a pound note if its worth a thrauneen: and he to offer me only sixteen tinpinny bits for her; the big blackguard! And I in want of cash, too. And I'll be bound he knew that same, the schaymer. Be the holy post, but I've a mind to ride back, and give the scoundhrel-but no matther ; was'nt I up to him at the fair of Ballydehab! Didn't I chate him as clever as a Jew, in that bargain about the two pigs then. Be Japers, but I got 'em tin shillings chaper than the worth of 'em, and so himself says now. The

blackguard robber that he is, to get that illigant pig from me so chape, and I in want of cash! And there was Dick Mullet, of Skimpeen, standin' by, and winkin' to Ned Bawn, only to have a laugh at me afther. Begor, there aint a bigger blackguard than Dick Mullet in the county Cork. I know some doings of his, some of his thricks, the schamin' chaytin' liar that he is. As impudent, good-for-nothing a scoundhrel as ever went unhanged. Not but what he is a good fellow too; an honest, friendly, good fellow and 'tis a div'lish nate mare he rides, and I know he wants to sell her. Thogh lo mon diaoul! can't you go asy, you bloody baste!" (His nag had stumbled in descending a precipice which formed part of the road.) D-n the grand jury, and Lord Blarney, too, the scoun

66

2 L

dhrel! that they won't repair the road. And its me harse is to be lamed, and myself to be kilt, maybe, wid their schaymin' and looking afther their own intherests. That new road that Lord Blarney has had made across the bog of Carrickasmudher, is as big a job as ever was seen, just a purpose to go by his own gate, and divil a hayporth of good to a sowl in the counthry besides. And he's got a presintment for a bridge to be built where there's no water to run undher it. An' 'tis myself that's payin' for their schames; and I can't get the road I want made from Raharoo to Clonforky." (This proposed road, by the bye, was a mere selfish scheme of poor Barney's, which, if carried into effect, would have enabled him to draw turf from a neighbouring bog, but the divil a haporth of good to a soul in the country besides !)

"Begor, its a set of schayming blackguards the grand jury are!- that's what they are entirely; and no gentlemen, nor honest men that cares for the public good. Wisha, but it would be a good thing for the counthry if we had such roads as Brook Aylmer talks about. But he's a fool, that fellow; he's no common sinse; a quare craythur. An honest, good young chap he is, too, and divilish clever; has a nice property of his own, and has a dale of larnin; and my girls are very fond of him. I hope I hav'nt lost his letther I got to-day.'

The squire here let the reins fall on the neck of his steed, and having tugged forth a letter from the pocket of his hunting frock, and surmounted his jolly red nose with a pair of antique spectacles, commenced the perusal for the tenth time since morning.

Barnaby O'Sherkin, Esquire, J. P., in common with many of his contemporaries had, throughout life, cultivated the mysteries of cock-shooting and foxhunting more deeply than the sciences of reading and writing. In early boyhood his father, an old drunkard, half farmer, half sportsman, had, in order to rid the house of a noisy, mischievous monkey, sent him to school at Ross, where he spent a twelvemonth, of which he retained rather disagreeable recollections. He had a confused reminiscence of sundry hard, qucer words, such as syntax; hic, hæc, hoc; conjugation, and the like; and a very distinct remembrance of being birched, on an average, twice a day. His scholastic

pro

course had, however, at least been ductive of this good, that, following up the A, B, C tuition of his mother, it had moderately qualified him to read. To write a letter was a task altogether beyond him. At the end of the year his father took him home, partly from a temporary inability to pay the schoolmaster's bill, and partly he did not know why. Since that epoch of his existence Barney had vegetated under the roof, and amid the rocks and hills of his forefathers, and had grown from youth to manhood in barbarism, ignorance, and idleness. Since his father's death, which occurred just before he came of age, he had lived, with few exceptions, entirely at Castle Sherkin; had drank, and hunted, and shot, and quarrelled, and joked, and planted potatoes, and talked of rebuilding the stable, and putting a new gate to the avenue, and mending the wall of the kitchen-garden, and of redeeming ancient incumbrances, and of doing sundry other mighty deeds, which he was always going to do, but which he never did, nor ever set about doing. Still the ideas of these things floating in his head gave him something to talk about; and his office of justice of the peace, by furnishing perpetual occasions of noisy palaver with the peasantry, gave him at least ostensible employment.

The only exceptions to this stagnant puddle of existence were his attendance twice in the year at the Cork assizes; on which occasions he sported a clean shirt, a whole coat, and a new neckcloth; and usually returned filled with hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness against the grand jury for preferring the doing of their own selfish jobs to the doing of his. He had also, shortly after coming of age, accompa nied a few wild young squires in a sort of rollicking trip to London, where they stayed for a few weeks, in the enjoy ment, as they said, of "the divil's own fun;" and from which excursion he brought a wife-a little cockney-who had fallen in love with his Milesian proportions and huge whiskers; and also was smitten with the notion of being mistress of Castle Sherkin, which he assured her was "an illigant place entirely." Among the traditions of the country were sundry amusing stories of the horror and amazement of the little Englishwoman, on her first introduction to this castle of the descendants of kings; of her astonishment at the sight of Mr.

;

O'Sherkin's establishment; and of her cockney-like ignorance of country matters, such as that ducks could fly, or that potatoes grew in the grouud. In due process of time a family of stout sons and daughters grew about them and under the influence of the English (albeit cockney) notions of their mother, were better educated than any generation of the O'Sherkins had been since the days of Ollam Fodla and the Hall of Tara. To the ways and deficiencies of her lord, Mrs. O'Sherkin had, with one exception, long since

reconciled herself, as being matters utterly irremediable. The one fault excepted was, in truth, a thumper. It was of a nature too atrocious for her to extend charity or mercy to it; it washis brogue! or, as she elegantly termed it, "that hodious and 'orrid Hirish haccent."

“Arrah Dinnis," he would say, "give us the praties!"

"Lord! Mr. O'Sherkin," his wife would respond, "Ow can you speak with such a consumed brogue? Can't you say 'taties,"

In

BROOK ALYMER's letter was dated a month previous to Mr. O'Sherkin's reception of it a Skibbereen. those blessed days of our ancestors, there were no mail coaches in Ireland, and the mails were carried, at least in such favoured districts as had the convenience of a post at all-by carriers, mostly on horseback, who performed their long weary pilgrimages with the mail-bag strapped behind them, along roads often of an exceedingly primitive description, in all weathers, sunshine, snow, and driving tempest. In many districts people resided twenty, thirty, or forty long miles from any post-town, and perhaps sent a messenger once a month, or at such time as they expected or wished to send a letter; and the messenger who went this long journey returned, it may be the second or third day, bringing back any letter or letters he may have found at the post-office, and whatever other things he may have been charged to procure.

In the primitive age of which I speak, Skibbereen had not attained to the dignity of a post-town.

It was first endowed with such privilege in the year 1787, previously to which step in the march of intellect Bandon was the post-town for the more westerly district of the county of Cork, with post from Dublin twice in the week; and residents at Clonakilty, or Skibbereen, or Crookhaven, or anywhere in that immense tract of country, were obliged to send, as described above, by private messengers to Bandon, for any tidings of the external world.

This state of seclusion and want of regular and speedy communication

with remote parts of Ireland, was partly remedied, on extraordinary occasions, by expresses, travelling at the rate of four or five miles an hour, concerning which we find it advertised in Watson's "Gentleman's and Citizen's Almanack" of that time, that "Any person in Dublin may have a private Express, forwarded from the General Post Office, Dublin, to any part of Ireland, on paying 3d. each English mile, and 6d. the horn of each stage, with the usual fees."

Imagine, gentle reader, as thou meditatest an epistle for Cork, to be despatched by the evening trainimagine, we say, as thou sittest in the coffee-room at Morrison's, sipping thy tipple, after seven hours' luxurious repose in a first-class carriage, wafted from Cork as upon the enchanted tapestry in the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," without fatigue or inconvenience ;-imagine, as thou indolently demandest of the waiter what time the post starts, being informed by that functionary, that "If you please, sir-if you wish-you can have an express, sir-who will carry your letter, sir at the rate of four miles an hour, sir-only threepence a mile, sir—sixpence for the horn each stage, sirand the usual fees, sir."

Imagine, benignant reader, the waiter at Morrison's giving you such an answer in the middle of the nineteenth century; and imagine, further, the benignant response you would greet him with. And yet such an

answer from the waiter would have been a very sensible, proper, intelligent, pertinent, and waiter-like answer, if uttered some eighty years ago. Well, reverse the tablet. Imagine