house at the cross-roads, about four miles from the town of
Ballypoteen. He was decidedly an honest man to his neighbors, but a
knave to excisemen, whom he hated by a kind of instinct that he had,
which prompted him, in order to satisfy his conscience, to render
them every practicable injury within the compass of his ingenuity.
Shebeen-house keepers and excisemen have been, time out of mind,
destructive of each other; the exciseman pouncing like a beast or bird
of prey upon the shebeen man and his illicit spirits; the shebeen man
staving in the exciseman, like a barrel of doublings, by a knock
from behind a hedge, which sometimes sent him to that world which is
emphatically the world of spirits. For this, it some happened that the
shebeen man was hanged; but as his death only multiplied that of the
excisemen in a geometrical ratio, the sharp-scented fraternity resolved,
if possible, not to risk their lives, either by exposing themselves to
the necessity of travelling by night, or prosecuting by day. In this
they acted wisely and prudently: fewer of the unfortunate peasantry
were shot in their rencounters with the yeomanry or military on such
occasions, and the retaliations became by degrees less frequent, until,
at length, the murder of a gauger became a rare occurrence in the
country.

Peter, before his marriage, had wrought as laboring servant to a man
who kept two or three private stills in those caverns among the remote
mountains, to which the gauger never thought of penetrating, because he
supposed that no human enterprise would have ever dreamt of advancing
farther into them than appeared to him to be practicable. In this he
was frequently mistaken: for though the still-house was in many cases
inaccessible to horses, yet by the contrivance of slipes--a kind of
sledge--a dozen men could draw a couple of sacks of barley with less
trouble, and at a quicker pace, than if horses only had been employed.
By this, and many other similar contrivances, the peasantry were often
able to carry on the work of private distillation in places so distant,
that few persons could suspect them as likely to be chosen for such
purposes. The uncommon personal strength, the daring spirit, and great
adroitness of Peter Connell, rendered him a very valuable acquisition
to his master in the course of his illicit occupations. Peter was,
in addition to his other qualities, sober and ready-witted, so that
whenever the gauger made his appearance