ole of the
winter."

"_Otium cum dignitate_," said Dan. "I spent my evenings in drawing up a
bill for the better recovery of small debts."

"How so, Dan?"

"Lending enough more, to bring the debtor into the superior
courts,--trying him for murder instead of manslaughter."

"Faith, you'd do either if you were put to it," said French, who merely
heard the words, without understanding the context.

Dan MacNaghten was now included in my father's invitation to Castle
Carew; and, after a few other allusions to past events and absent
friends, they all took their leave, and my father hastened to join his
bride.

"You thought them very noisy, my dear," said my father, in reply to a
remark of hers. "They, I have no doubt, were perfectly astonished at
their excessive quietness,--an air of decorum only assumed because they
heard you were in the next room."

"They were not afraid of me, I trust," said she, smiling. "Not exactly
afraid," said my father, with a very peculiar smile.

CHAPTER III. A FATHER AND DAUGHTER

The celebrated money-lender and bill-discounter of Dublin in the times
we speak of, was a certain Mr. Fagan, popularly called "The Grinder,"
from certain peculiarities in his dealings with those who stood in need
of his aid. He had been, and indeed so had his father before him, a
fruit-seller, in a quarter of the city called Mary's Abbey,--a trade
which he still affected to carry on, although it was well known that the
little transactions of the front shop bore no imaginable proportion
to the important events which were conducted in the small and gloomy
back-parlor behind it.

It was a period of unbounded extravagance. Few even of the wealthiest
lived within their incomes. Many maintained a style and pretension
far beyond their fortunes, the first seeds of that crop of ruin whose
harvest we are now witnessing. By large advances on mortgage, and great
loans at moments of extreme pressure, the Grinder had amassed an
immense fortune, at the same time that he possessed a very considerable
influence in many counties, in whose elections he took a deep although
secret interest.

If money-getting and money-hoarding was the great passion of his
existence, it was in reality so in furtherance of two objects, on which
he seemed to have set his whole heart. One of these was the emancipation
of the Catholics; the other, the elevation of his only child, a
daughter, to rank and station, by means of a high marriage.