by an unhappy accident, the least illustrated by any record of its acts.
MacNaghten, my chief source of information hitherto, is here unable to
guide or direct me. He knew nothing of my father's movements, nor did
he hold any direct intercourse with him. Whatever letters may have been
written by my father himself, I am unable to tell, none of them having
ever reached me. My difficulty is therefore considerable, having little
to guide me beyond chance paragraphs in some of Fagan's letters to
his daughter, and some two or three formal communications on business
matters to my mother.

There is yet enough even in these scattered notices to show that Fagan's
hopes of realizing the great ambition of his life had been suddenly
and unexpectedly renewed. Not alone was he inclined to believe that my
father might become the political leader of his own peculiar party, and
take upon him the unclaimed position of an Irish champion, but, further
still, he persuaded himself that my father was not really married, and
that the present conjuncture offered a favorable prospect of making him
his son-in-law.

The reader has already seen from what a slight foundation this edifice
sprung,--a random word spoken by my father at a moment of great
excitement; a half-muttered regret, wrung from him in a paroxysm of
wounded self-love.

He was not the first, nor will he be the last, who shall raise up a
structure for which the will alone supplies material; mayhap, too, in
his case, the fire of hope had never been totally extinguished in
his heart, and from its smouldering embers now burst out this new and
brilliant flame.

It was about an hour after midnight that a chaise, with four horses,
drew up at Fagan's door; and, after a brief delay, a sick man was
assisted carefully down the stairs and deposited within the carriage.
Raper took his place beside him, and, with a speed that denoted urgency,
the equipage drove away, and, passing through many a narrow lane and
alley, emerged from the city at last, and took the great western road.

Fallrach, even in our own day of universal travel and research, is a
wild and lonely spot; but at the time I refer to, it was as utterly
removed from all intercourse with the world as some distant settlement
of Central America. Situated in a little bend or bight of coast where
the Killeries opens to the great ocean, backed by lofty mountains, and
flanked either by the sea or the still less accessible crags of gran