art of his features, but I could distinguish a pair of
fierce-looking mustaches beneath, which curled upwards towards his eyes,
while a stiff point beard stuck straight from his chin. Fearing lest my
rude interruption had been overheard, I was framing some polite speech in
Portuguese, when he opened the dialogue by asking in that language how I
did.

I replied, and was about to ask some questions relative to where, and
under whose protection I then was, when my grave-looking friend, giving a
pirouette upon one leg, sent his hat flying into the air, and cried out in
a voice that not even my memory could fail to recognize,--

"By the rock of Cashel he's cured!--he's cured!--the fever's over! Oh,
Master Charles, dear! oh, Master, darling, and you ain't mad, after all?"

"Mad! no, faith! but I shrewdly suspect you must be."

"Oh, devil a taste! But spake to me, honey; spake to me, acushla!"

"Where am I? Whose house is this? What do you mean by that disguise, that
beard--"

"Whisht, I'll tell you all, av you have patience? But are you cured? Tell
me that first. Sure they was going to cut the arm off you, till you got out
of bed, and with your pistols, sent them flying, one out of the window and
the other down-stairs; and I bate the little chap with the saw myself till
he couldn't know himself in the glass."

While Mike ran on at this rate, I never took my eyes from him, and it was
all my poor faculties were equal to, to convince myself that the whole
scene was not some vision of a wandering intellect. Gradually, however, the
well-known features recalled me to myself, and as my doubts gave way at
length, I laughed long and heartily at the masquerade absurdity of his
appearance.

Mike, meanwhile, whose face expressed no small mistrust at the sincerity of
my mirth, having uncloaked himself, proceeded to lay aside his beard and
mustaches, saying, as he did so,--

"There now, darling; there now, Master, dear,--don't be grinning that
way,--I'll not be a Portigee any more, av you'll be quiet and listen to
reason."

"But, Mike, where am I? Answer me that one question."

"You're at home, dear; where else would you be?"

"At home?" said I, with a start, as my eye ranged over the various articles
of luxury and elegance around, so unlike the more simple and unpretending
features of my uncle's house,--"at home?"

"Ay, just so; sure, isn't it the same thing. It's ould Don Emanuel that
owns it; and won't it be your own when