onounced our arrangements perfect, and
suggested a round game, by way of passing the time.

'We are now,' said he, 'on the long level for eighteen miles; there's
neither a lock nor a town to disturb us. Give Mrs. Carney the cards.'

The proposition was met with hearty approval; and thus did I, Lieutenant
Hinton, of the Grenadier Guards, extra aide-de-camp to the viceroy,
discover myself at four in the morning engaged at a game of loo, whose
pecuniary limits were fourpence, but whose boundaries as to joke and
broad humour were wide as the great Atlantic. Day broke, and I found
myself richer by some tumblers of the very strongest whisky punch, a
confounded headache, and two-and-eightpence in bad copper jingling in my
pocket.

CHAPTER XX. SHANNON HARBOUR

Little does he know who voyages in a canal-boat, dragged along some
three miles and a half per hour, ignominiously at the tails of two
ambling hackneys, what pride, pomp, and circumstance await him at the
first town he enters. Seated on the deck, watching with a Dutchman's
apathy the sedgy banks, whose tall naggers bow their heads beneath the
ripple that eddies from the bow--now lifting his eyes from earth to sky,
with nothing to interest, nothing to attract him, turning from the
gaze of the long dreary tract of bog and moorland, to look upon his
fellow-travellers, whose features are perhaps neither more striking
nor more pleasing--the monotonous jog of the postillion before, the
impassive placidity of the helmsman behind; the lazy smoke that seems to
lack energy to issue from the little chimney; the brown and leaden
look of all around--have something dreamy and sleep-compelling, almost
impossible to resist. And, already, as the voyager droops his head, and
lets fall his eyelids, a confused and misty sense of some everlasting
journey, toilsome, tedious, and slow, creeps over his besotted
faculties; when suddenly the loud bray of the horn breaks upon his
ears--the sound is re-echoed from a distance--the far-off tinkle of a
bell is borne along the water, and he sees before him, as if conjured
up by some magician's wand, the roofs and chimneys of a little village.
Meanwhile the excitement about him increases: the deck is lumbered with
hampers and boxes, and parcels--the note of departure to many a cloaked
and frieze-coated passenger has rung; for, strange as it may seem,
in that little assemblage of mud hovels, with their dunghills and
duck-pools around them, with