de the best of my way towards the Ennis road.

Joe soon found me an urchin to succeed him as my guide and companion;
and with an affectionate leave-taking, and a faithful promise to meet me
sometime and somewhere, we parted.

So long as I had journeyed along beside my poor, half-witted follower,
the strange and fickle features of his wandering intellect had somehow
interrupted the channels of my own feelings, and left me no room for
reflection on my changed fortunes. Now, however, my thoughts returned to
the past with all the force of some dammed-up current, and my blighted
hopes threw a dark and sombre shadow over all my features. What cared
I what became of me? Why did I hasten hither and thither? These were my
first reflections. If life had lost its charm, so had misfortune lost
its terror. There seemed something frivolous and contemptible in the
return to those duties which in all the buoyant exhilaration of my
former life had ever seemed unfitting and unmanly. No! rather let me
seek for some employment on active service. The soldier's career I once
longed for, to taste its glorious enthusiasm--that I wished for now, to
enjoy its ceaseless movement and exertion.

As I thought over all I had seen and gone through since my arrival in
Ireland--its varied scenes of mirth and woe; its reckless pleasures, its
wilder despair--I believed that I had acquired a far deeper insight into
my own heart in proportion as I looked more into those of others. A not
unfrequent error this. The outstretched page of human nature that I had
been gazing on had shown me the passions and feelings of other men laid
bare before me, while my own heart was dark, enshrined, and unvisited
within me. I believed that life had no longer anything to tie me to
it--and I was not then twenty! Had I counted double as many years, I had
had more reason for the belief, and more difficulty to think so.

Sometimes I endeavoured to console myself by thinking of all the
obstacles that under the happiest circumstances must have opposed
themselves to my union with Louisa Bellew. My mother's pride alone
seemed an insurmountable one. But then I thought of what a noble part
had lain before me, to prefer the object of my love--the prize of my
own winning--to all the caresses of fortune, all the seductions of the
world. Sir Simon Bellew, too--what could he mean? The secret he alluded
to, what was it? Alas! what mattered it? My doom was sealed, my fate
decided; I had n