th
half-doors, and such pretension to being shops as a quart of meal, or
salt, displayed in the window, confers; or sometimes two tobacco-pipes,
placed "saltier-wise," would appear the only vendible article in the
establishment. A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of woe-begone
poverty, I never beheld.

If I turned for consolation to the back of the house, my eyes fell upon
the dirty yard of a dirty inn; the half-thatched cow-shed, where two
famished animals mourned their hard fate,--"chewing the cud of sweet and
bitter fancy;" the chaise, the yellow post-chaise, once the pride and
glory of the establishment, now stood reduced from its wheels, and
ignominiously degraded to a hen-house; on the grass-grown roof a cock had
taken his stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered
inhabitants beneath:

"To what base uses must we come at last."

That chaise, which once had conveyed the blooming bride, all blushes and
tenderness, and the happy groom, on their honeymoon visit to Ballybunion
and its romantic caves, or to the gigantic cliffs and sea-girt shores of
Moher--or with more steady pace and becoming gravity had borne along the
"going judge of assize,"--was now become a lying-in hospital for fowl,
and a nursery for chickens. Fallen as I was myself from my high estate,
it afforded me a species of malicious satisfaction to contemplate these
sad reverses of fortune; and I verily believe--for on such slight
foundation our greatest resolves are built--that if the rain had
continued a week longer, I should have become a misanthropist for life.
I made many inquiries from my landlady as to the society of the place,
but the answers I received only led to greater despondence. My
predecessor here, it seemed, had been an officer of a veteran battalion,
with a wife, and that amount of children which is algebraically expressed
by an X (meaning an unknown quantity). He, good man, in his two years'
sojourn here, had been much more solicitous about his own affairs, than
making acquaintance with his neighbours; and at last, the few persons who
had been in the habit of calling on "the officer," gave up the practice;
and as there were no young ladies to refresh Pa's memory on the matter,
they soon forgot completely that such a person existed--and to this happy
oblivion I, Harry Lorrequer, succeeded, and was thus left without benefit
of clergy to the tender mercies of Mrs. Healy of the Burton arms.

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