nd the caution of the Cromwellite settlers who
erected them. At the time of which I speak, this building was tenanted
by an elderly man, whose starch and puritanic mien and manners might
have become the morose preaching parliamentarian captain, who had raised
the house and ruled the household more than a hundred years before;
but this man, though Protestant by descent as by name, was not so in
religion; he was a strict, and in outward observances, an exemplary
Catholic; his father had returned in early youth to the true faith, and
died in the bosom of the church.

Martin Heathcote was, at the time of which I speak, a widower, but his
house-keeping was not on that account altogether solitary, for he had a
daughter, whose age was now sufficiently advanced to warrant her father
in imposing upon her the grave duties of domestic superintendence.

This little establishment was perfectly isolated, and very little
intruded upon by acts of neighbourhood; for the rank of its occupants
was of that equivocal kind which precludes all familiar association
with those of a decidedly inferior rank, while it is not sufficient to
entitle its possessors to the society of established gentility, among
whom the nearest residents were the O'Maras of Carrigvarah, whose
mansion-house, constructed out of the ruins of an old abbey, whose
towers and cloisters had been levelled by the shot of Cromwell's
artillery, stood not half a mile lower upon the river banks.

Colonel O'Mara, the possessor of the estates, was then in a declining
state of health, and absent with his lady from the country, leaving at
the castle, his son young O'Mara, and a kind of humble companion, named
Edward Dwyer, who, if report belied him not, had done in his early days
some PECULIAR SERVICES for the Colonel, who had been a gay man--perhaps
worse--but enough of recapitulation.

It was in the autumn of the year 17-- that the events which led to the
catastrophe which I have to detail occurred. I shall run through the
said recital as briefly as clearness will permit, and leave you to
moralise, if such be your mood, upon the story of real life, which I
even now trace at this distant period not without emotion.

It was upon a beautiful autumn evening, at that glad period of the
season when the harvest yields its abundance, that two figures were seen
sauntering along the banks of the winding river, which I described as
bounding the farm occupied by Heathcote; they had been, as