that day to this I never heard
more of purgathory; and ye see, Master Charles, I think I was right."

Scarcely had Mike concluded when my door was suddenly burst open, and Sir
Harry Boyle, without assuming any of his usual precautions respecting
silence and quiet, rushed into the room, a broad grin upon his honest
features, and his eyes twinkling in a way that evidently showed me
something had occurred to amuse him.

"By Jove, Charley, I mustn't keep it from you; it's too good a thing not
to tell you. Do you remember that very essenced young gentleman who
accompanied Sir George Dashwood from Dublin, as a kind of electioneering
friend?"

"Do you mean Mr. Prettyman?"

"The very man; he was, you are aware, an under-secretary in some government
department. Well, it seems that he had come down among us poor savages as
much from motives of learned research and scientific inquiry, as though we
had been South Sea Islanders; report had gifted us humble Galwayans with
some very peculiar traits, and this gifted individual resolved to record
them. Whether the election week might have sufficed his appetite for
wonders I know not; but he was peaceably taking his departure from the west
on Saturday last, when Phil Macnamara met him, and pressed him to dine that
day with a few friends at his house. You know Phil; so that when I tell you
Sam Burke, of Greenmount, and Roger Doolan were of the party, I need
not say that the English traveller was not left to his own unassisted
imagination for his facts. Such anecdotes of our habits and customs as they
crammed him with, it would appear, never were heard before; nothing was
too hot or too heavy for the luckless cockney, who, when not sipping
his claret, was faithfully recording in his tablet the mems. for a very
brilliant and very original work on Ireland.

"Fine country, splendid country; glorious people,--gifted, brave,
intelligent, but not happy,--alas! Mr. Macnamara, not happy. But we don't
know you, gentlemen,--we don't indeed,--at the other side of the Channel.
Our notions regarding you are far, very far from just."

"I hope and trust," said old Burke, "you'll help them to a better
understanding ere long."

"Such, my dear sir, will be the proudest task of my life. The facts I have
heard here this evening have made so profound an impression upon me that I
burn for the moment when I can make them known to the world at large. To
think--just to think that a portion of this beautifu