years ago, _I_ can tell you. There he stands the same; and yet a
stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless,
busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to
the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and
affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race. Thou hast a
story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds
would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the
moaning reeds.

The palmy days of Chapelizod were just about a hundred years ago, and
those days--though I am jealous of their pleasant and kindly fame, and
specially for the preservation of the few memorials they have left
behind, were yet, I may say, in your ear, with all their colour and
adventure--perhaps, on the whole, more pleasant to read about, and dream
of, than they were to live in. Still their violence, follies, and
hospitalities, softened by distance, and illuminated with a sort of
barbaric splendour, have long presented to my fancy the glowing and
ever-shifting combinations upon which, as on the red embers, in a
winter's gloaming, I love to gaze, propping my white head upon my hand,
in a lazy luxury of reverie, from my own arm-chair, while they drop,
ever and anon, into new shapes, and silently tell their 'winter's
tales.'

When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this
narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old--how long ago precisely
that was, is nothing to the purpose, 'tis enough to say he remembers
what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a week
ago--it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his
holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod.
On the second day of his, or rather _my_ sojourn (I take leave to return
to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady. Her
name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable,
being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in
the county of Sligo, to the church-yard of Chapelizod. There was a great
flat stone over that small parcel of the rector's freehold, which the
family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for
ever. So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had
little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of
this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as
straig