rse; so he taught 'em all, as he
said, to know the law of landlord and tenant. As for law, I believe no
man, dead or alive, ever loved it so well as Sir Murtagh. He had once
sixteen suits pending at a time, and I never saw him so much himself:
roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds, eel-wires, orchards, trees, tithes,
vagrants, gravelpits, sandpits, dunghills, and nuisances, everything
upon the face of the earth furnished him good matter for a suit. He used
to boast that he had a lawsuit for every letter in the alphabet. How
I used to wonder to see Sir Murtagh in the midst of the papers in his
office! Why, he could hardly turn about for them. I made bold to shrug
my shoulders once in his presence, and thanked my stars I was not born a
gentleman to so much toil and trouble; but Sir Murtagh took me up short
with his old proverb, 'learning is better than house or land.' Out of
forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen [See
GLOSSARY 10]; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs
sometimes; but even that did not pay. He was a very learned man in the
law, and had the character of it; but how it was I can't tell, these
suits that he carried cost him a power of money: in the end he sold some
hundreds a year of the family estate; but he was a very learned man in
the law, and I know nothing of the matter, except having a great regard
for the family; and I could not help grieving when he sent me to post up
notices of the sale of the fee simple of the lands and appurtenances of
Timoleague.

'I know, honest Thady,' says he, to comfort me, 'what I'm about better
than you do; I'm only selling to get the ready money wanting to carry on
my suit with spirit with the Nugents of Carrickashaughlin.'

He was very sanguine about that suit with the Nugents of
Carrickashaughlin. He could have gained it, they say, for certain, had
it pleased Heaven to have spared him to us, and it would have been
at the least a plump two thousand a year in his way; but things were
ordered otherwise--for the best to be sure. He dug up a fairy-mount
against my advice, and had no luck afterwards. [These fairy-mounts are
called ant-hills in England. They are held in high reverence by the
common people in Ireland. A gentleman, who in laying out his lawn had
occasion to level one of these hillocks, could not prevail upon any of
his labourers to begin the ominous work. He was obliged to take a LOY
from one of their reluctant hands, and b