ach, a tandem, and a running account--I
think it _galloped_--at every shop in the town.

"Let me pause for a moment here, O'Mealey, while I moralize a little in a
strain I hope may benefit you. Have you ever considered--of course you have
not, you're too young and unreflecting--how beautifully every climate
and every soil possesses some one antidote or another to its own noxious
influences? The tropics have their succulent and juicy fruits, cooling and
refreshing; the northern latitudes have their beasts with fur and warm skin
to keep out the frost-bites; and so it is in Ireland. Nowhere on the face
of the habitable globe does a man contract such habits of small debt, and
nowhere, I'll be sworn, can he so easily get out of any scrape concerning
them. They have their tigers in the east, their antelopes in the south,
their white bears in Norway, their buffaloes in America; but we have an
animal in Ireland that beats them all hollow,--a country attorney!

"Now, let me introduce you to Mr. Matthew Donevan. Mat, as he was
familiarly called by his numerous acquaintances, was a short, florid, rosy
little gentleman of some four or five-and-forty, with a well-curled wig of
the fairest imaginable auburn, the gentle wave of the front locks, which
played in infantine loveliness upon his little bullet forehead, contrasting
strongly enough with a cunning leer of his eye, and a certain _nisi prius_
laugh that however it might please a client, rarely brought pleasurable
feelings to his opponent in a cause.

"Mat was a character in his way; deep, double, and tricky in everything
that concerned his profession, he affected the gay fellow,--liked a jolly
dinner at Brown's Hotel, would go twenty miles to see a steeple-chase and
a coursing match, bet with any one when the odds were strong in his favor,
with an easy indifference about money that made him seem, when winning,
rather the victim of good luck than anything else. As he kept a rather
pleasant bachelor's house, and liked the military much, we soon became
acquainted. Upon him, therefore, for reasons I can't explain, both our
hopes reposed; and Shaugh and myself at once agreed that if Mat could not
assist us in our distresses, the case was a bad one.

"A pretty little epistle was accordingly concocted, inviting the worthy
attorney to a small dinner at five o'clock the next day, intimating that we
were to be perfectly alone, and had a little business to discuss. True to
the hour, Mat