t among the crowd as we changed horses; and I warrant me
there was as much shouting set up in praise of my honour as if my Lord
Townshend, the Lord Lieutenant himself, had been passing.

My second day's journey--for the Irish roads were rough in those days,
and the progress of a gentleman's chariot terribly slow--brought me to
Carlow, where I put up at the very inn which I had used eleven years
back, when flying from home after the supposed murder of Quin in the
duel. How well I remember every moment of the scene! The old landlord
was gone who had served me; the inn that I then thought so comfortable
looked wretched and dismantled; but the claret was as good as in the old
days, and I had the host to partake of a jug of it and hear the news of
the country.

He was as communicative as hosts usually are: the crops and the markets,
the price of beasts at last Castle Dermot fair, the last story about the
vicar, and the last joke of Father Hogan the priest; how the Whiteboys
had burned Squire Scanlan's ricks, and the highwaymen had been beaten
off in their attack upon Sir Thomas's house; who was to hunt the
Kilkenny hounds next season, and the wonderful run entirely they had
last March; what troops were in the town, and how Miss Biddy Toole
had run off with Ensign Mullins: all the news of sport, assize, and
quarter-sessions were detailed by this worthy chronicler of small-beer,
who wondered that my honour hadn't heard of them in England, or in
foreign parts, where he seemed to think the world was as interested
as he was about the doings of Kilkenny and Carlow. I listened to these
tales with, I own, a considerable pleasure; for every now and then a
name would come up in the conversation which I remembered in old days,
and bring with it a hundred associations connected with them.

I had received many letters from my mother, which informed me of the
doings of the Brady's Town family. My uncle was dead, and Mick, his
eldest son, had followed him too to the grave. The Brady girls had
separated from their paternal roof as soon as their elder brother came
to rule over it. Some were married, some gone to settle with their
odious old mother in out-of-the-way watering-places. Ulick, though he
had succeeded to the estate, had come in for a bankrupt property, and
Castle Brady was now inhabited only by the bats and owls, and the old
gamekeeper. My mother, Mrs. Harry Barry, had gone to live at Bray, to
sit under Mr. Jowls, her favourite