forth to quell the latent foe.

We have already stated that O'Driscol's real character was thoroughly
known by the country-folks around him, as the character of every such
person usually is. Whilst he proceeds, then, upon his daring and heroic
enterprise, we beg leave to state very briefly, that Fergus and Alick
Purcel, having laid their heads together, procured, each, two of their
father's laborers, whom they furnished material wherewith to blacken
their faces; not omitting four large cabbage-stalks, with the heads
attached, and kept under the right arm of each. These had been trimmed
and blackened also, in order to have more the appearance of fire-arms.
Thus armed, and with appropriate instructions, they planted themselves
inside the hedges which inclosed the narrow turn of the road at
Philpot's cornet, and awaited their "unsuspecting victim," as the phrase
unhappily, and with too much truth, goes.

O'Driscol, on approaching the fatal spot, regretted that there were no
eyes upon this extraordinary manifestation of courage. He stretched up
his neck and looked about him in all directions, with a hope that some
one might observe the firmness and utter absence of all fear with which
he came up to the place where the assassins were to lie in wait for
him. He had now come within ten or twelve yards of it when, such was the
force of his own cowardly imagination, that it had worked him up from a
fictitious into a real terror; and on approaching the spot, he could not
prevent himself from coughing pretty loudly, in order to ascertain that
there really was no such thing as ah assassin behind the hedges. He
coughed, we say, with a double case of pistols in his hand, when, heaven
and earth! was the cough responded to--and in a jarring style--from
behind the hedge to the right? He paused, pulled up his horse, and
coughed again, when it also was responded to from that on the left; and
at the same time four faces, dreadfully blackened, peeped, two on
each side of him, and levelling their black and dreadful-looking
blunderbusses--for they could be nothing else--were about to rid the
world of a loyal magistrate, and deprive the Castle of its best friend
and correspondent, when the latter gentleman, wheeling Duke Schomberg
round, put him to most inglorious flight, and scampered off at the top
of his speed.

The jest was admirably managed; and nothing could exceed the unction
with which he related his encounter with the villains. In f