all-room, whiskey negus, white satin
shoes, and a quarrel with your guardian--it's ten to one you fall into
before you're a week in the same town with them.

"As for the men, I don't admire them so much: pleasant and cheerful enough
when they're handicapping the coat off your back, and your new tilbury for
a spavined pony and a cotton umbrella, but regular devils if you come to
cross them the least in life; nothing but ten paces, three shots apiece, to
begin and end with something like Roger de Coverley, when every one has a
pull at his neighbor. I'm not saying they're not agreeable, well-informed,
and mild in their habits; but they lean overmuch to corduroys and coroners'
inquests for one's taste farther south. However, they're a fine people,
take them all in all; and if they were not interfered with, and their
national customs invaded with road-making, petty-sessions, grand-jury laws,
and a stray commission now and then, they are capable of great things, and
would astonish the world.

"But as I was saying, we were ordered to Loughrea after being fifteen
months in detachments about Birr, Tullamore, Kilbeggan, and all that
country; the change was indeed a delightful one, and we soon found
ourselves the centre of the most marked and determined civilities. I told
you they were wise people in the west; this was their calculation: the
line--ours was the Roscommon militia--are here to-day, there to-morrow;
they may be flirting in Tralee this week, and fighting on the Tagus the
next; not that there was any fighting there in those times, but then there
was always Nova Scotia and St. John's, and a hundred other places that a
Galway young lady knew nothing about, except that people never came back
from them. Now, what good, what use was there in falling in love with them?
Mere transitory and passing pleasure that was. But as for us: there we
were; if not in Kilkenny we were in Cork. Safe out and come again; no
getting away under pretence of foreign service; no excuse for not marrying
by any cruel pictures of the colonies, where they make spatch-cocks of the
officers' wives and scrape their infant families to death with a small
tooth-comb. In a word, my dear O'Mealey, we were at a high premium; and
even O'Shaughnessy, with his red head and the legs you see, had his
admirers. There now, don't be angry, Dan; the men, at least, were mighty
partial to you.

"Loughrea, if it was a pleasant, was a very expensive place. White gloves
a