married at home; never soared beyond a topic of Irish growth,
and voted at the tail of those two or three great men who comprise
within themselves all that we know of Irish independence. "Even idolatry
would be dear at that price," cried he, aloud, at the end of his
reflections,--bitter and unpleasant reveries in which he had been sunk
as he travelled up to town some few days after the events related in the
last chapter.

Matters of business with his law agent had called him to the capital,
where he expected to be detained for a day or two. My mother had not
accompanied him, her state of health at the time requiring rest
and quietude. Alone, an invalid, and in a frame of, to him, unusual
depression, he arrived at his hotel at nightfall. It was not the
"Drogheda Arms," where he stopped habitually, but the "Clare," a smaller
and less frequented house in the same street, and where he hoped to
avoid meeting with his ordinary acquaintances.

Vexed with everything, even to the climate, to which he wrongfully
ascribed the return of his malady, he was bent on making immediate
arrangements to leave Ireland, and forever. His pecuniary affairs were,
it is true, in a condition of great difficulty and embarrassment; still,
with every deduction, a very large income, or at least what for the
Continent would be thought so, would remain; and with this he determined
to go abroad and seek out some spot more congenial to his tastes and
likings, and, as he also fancied, more favorable to his health.

The hotel was almost full, and my father with difficulty obtained
a couple of rooms; and even for these he was obliged to await the
departure of the occupant, which he was assured would take place
immediately. In the mean while, he had ordered his supper in the
coffee-room, where now he was seated, in one of those gloomy looking
stalls which in those times were supposed to comprise all that could be
desired of comfort and isolation.

It was, indeed, a new thing for him to find himself thus,--he, the rich,
the flattered, the high-spirited, the centre of so much worship and
adulation, whose word was law upon the turf, and whose caprices gave the
tone to fashion, the solitary occupant of a dimly lighted division in a
public coffee-room, undistinguished and unknown. There was something
in the abrupt indifference of the waiter that actually pleased him,
ministering, as it did, to the self-tormentings of his reflections. All
seemed to say, "This