the most unfavourable to passing a life of
quiet plenty and security. When to this it is added, that from the scanty
number of gentry the Government of the day deemed it prudent to entrust
with the commission of the peace, in self-defence he was obliged to be a
magistrate, an office which not unfrequently compelled him to be
complainant, counsel, and convicting justice in his own cause, some idea
may be formed of the difficulties and vexations the Vicar of Clogheen had
to encounter in the collection of those tithes from which his income was
principally derived. Notwithstanding, during the twenty or five-and-twenty
years of his incumbency, if his temper did not progress towards
improvement, his fortune did. By an ample dowery received with his wife,
and exact economy and prudence, he had been enabled, from time to time, to
make considerable purchases in land; until at length Mr Tyrrel was
accounted, if not the most popular, at least one of the most prosperous
clergymen from Dunmanway to the Devil's Bit. He had become a widower early
in life, and around his daughter Katey, the sole offspring of his
marriage, those sympathies and affections which were denied vent in every
other quarter, were concentrated in a lavish and inexhaustible flood. A
few short years of a mother's superintendence--some attempts at
home-education, (for he would not trust her from his sight,) in the shape
of a little petticoated rebel, who would be taught nothing, and a sickly
governess who had nothing to teach--a girlhood of romance-reading, riding
rough colts with her cousin Lysaght Osborne, and rambling among the
peasantry--and we have the result of the clergyman's fondness and folly in
the wild, lively blue-eyed maiden of nineteen, now wending her way along
the dim and elm-darkened road leading from the town of Clogheen to her
father's mansion, nearly a mile away. Even in the early part of an autumn
evening few persons were desirous of travelling alone in that
neighbourhood; but Katey trod her path in perfect security. She was known
to every body, and by the surrounding peasantry (to whom she ever came,
with her purse or prescriptions of pots of jam, warm jackets and flannel
bed-gowns, a living and lovely Replevin for many of her sire's exactions)
she was treated with a fond regard, which can only be estimated by those
who know how largely the smallest loan of kindness--of real
_disinterested_ kindness--is repaid by that people. Wayward and innocen