refractory child. But as we entered, all three of Haggarty's
darlings were in full roar.

"Is it you, Dennis?" cried a sharp raw voice, from a dark corner in
the drawing-room to which we were introduced, and in which a dirty
tablecloth was laid for dinner, some bottles of porter and a cold
mutton-bone being laid out on a rickety grand piano hard by. "Ye're
always late, Mr. Haggarty. Have you brought the whisky from Nowlan's?
I'll go bail ye've not, now."

"My dear, I've brought an old friend of yours and mine to take pot-luck
with us to-day," said Dennis.

"When is he to come?" said the lady. At which speech I was rather
surprised, for I stood before her.

"Here he is, Jemima my love," answered Dennis, looking at me. "Mr.
Fitz-Boodle: don't you remember him in Warwickshire, darling?"

"Mr. Fitz-Boodle! I am very glad to see him," said the lady, rising and
curtseying with much cordiality.

Mrs. Haggarty was blind.

Mrs. Haggarty was not only blind, but it was evident that smallpox
had been the cause of her loss of vision. Her eyes were bound with a
bandage, her features were entirely swollen, scarred and distorted by
the horrible effects of the malady. She had been knitting in a corner
when we entered, and was wrapped in a very dirty bedgown. Her voice to
me was quite different to that in which she addressed her husband. She
spoke to Haggarty in broad Irish: she addressed me in that most odious
of all languages--Irish-English, endeavouring to the utmost to disguise
her brogue, and to speak with the true dawdling distingue English air.

"Are you long in I-a-land?" said the poor creature in this accent. "You
must faind it a sad ba'ba'ous place, Mr Fitz-Boodle, I'm shu-ah! It was
vary kaind of you to come upon us en famille, and accept a dinner sans
ceremonie. Mr. Haggarty, I hope you'll put the waine into aice, Mr.
Fitz-Boodle must be melted with this hot weathah."

For some time she conducted the conversation in this polite strain, and
I was obliged to say, in reply to a query of hers, that I did not find
her the least altered, though I should never have recognised her but for
this rencontre. She told Haggarty with a significant air to get the wine
from the cellah, and whispered to me that he was his own butlah; and the
poor fellow, taking the hint, scudded away into the town for a pound of
beefsteak and a couple of bottles of wine from the tavern.

"Will the childhren get their potatoes and butther here?" sai