said he,
"and the people opposite have searched this house from cellar to
garret and never made the discovery Paddy did a moment since."

He got a stout rope and sent a man down, who found Paddy much more
frightened than hurt. We hoisted both of them up, and Paddy was a
sight to behold.

"Bad luck to ye," says I; "just at the moment I want a presentable lad
behind me when I'm paying my respects to the Earl of Westport, you
must go diving into the refuse heap of a house that doesn't belong to
you, and spoiling the clothes that does. Paddy, if you were in a seven
years' war, you would be the first man wounded and the last man
killed, with all the trouble for nothing in between. Is there anything
broken about ye?"

"Every leg and arm I've got is broken," he whimpered, but Father
Donovan, who was nearly as much of a surgeon as a priest, passed his
hand over the trembling lad, then smote him on the back, and said the
exercise of falling had done him good.

"Get on with you," said I, "and get off with those clothes. Wash
yourself, and put on the suit I was wearing yesterday, and see that
you don't fall in the water-jug and drown yourself."

I gave the order for Tom Peel to saddle the four horses and get six of
his men with swords and pistols and blunderbusses to act as an escort
for me.

"Are you going back to Rye, your honour?" asked Peel.

"I am not. I am going to the Manor House."

"That's but a step," he cried in surprise.

"It's a step," said I, "that will be taken with dignity and
consequence."

So, with the afternoon sun shining in our faces, we set out from the
house of Brede, leaving but few men to guard it. Of course I ran the
risk that it might be taken in our absence; but I trusted the word of
Lord Strepp as much as I distrusted the designs of his father and
mother, and Strepp had been the captain of the expedition against us;
but if I had been sure the mansion was lost to me, I would have evaded
none of the pomp of my march to the Manor House in the face of such
pride as these upstarts of Westports exhibited toward a representative
of a really ancient family like the O'Ruddy. So his Reverence and I
rode slowly side by side, with Jem and Paddy, also on horseback, a
decent interval behind us, and tramping in their wake that giant, Tom
Peel, with six men nearly as stalwart as himself, their blunderbusses
over their shoulders, following him. It struck panic in the village
when they saw this terrible ar