d as I walked my room my heart bounded with
elation, and my step grew firm in its tread, for I felt that already a
new influence was beaming on me, a new light was shining upon my path
in life. Musing thus, I paid but little attention to my servant who
had just left a letter upon my table; my eye, at length, glanced at the
address, which I perceived was in my mother's handwriting. I opened it
somewhat carelessly, for somehow my dear mother's letters had gradually
decreased in their interest as my anti-Irish prejudices grew weaker by
time; her exclusively English notions I could no longer respond to so
freely as before; and as I knew the injustice of some of her opinions, I
felt proportionably dispose to mistrust the truth of many others.

The letter, as usual, was crossed and recrossed; for nothing, after
all, was so thorough a criterion of fashion as a penurious avoidance
of postage, and in consequence scarcely a portion of the paper was
uncovered by ink. The detail of balls and dinners, the gossip of the
town, the rumoured changes in the ministry--who was to come in and who
to go out; whether Lord Arthur got a regiment, or Lady Mary a son--had
all become comparatively uninteresting to me. What we know and what we
live in, is the world to us; and the arrival of a new bear is as much a
matter of interest in the prairies of the far west as the first night
of a new ballet in the circles of Paris. In all probability, therefore,
after satisfying myself that my friends were well, I should have been
undutiful enough to put my mother's letter to bed in a card-rack without
any very immediate intention of disturbing its slumbers, when suddenly
the word 'Rooney' attracted my eye, and at once awakened my curiosity.
How the name of these people should have come to my mother's
aristocratic ears I could not conceive; for although I had myself begun
a letter about them, yet, on second thoughts, I deemed it better to
consign it to destruction than risk a discovery, by no means necessary.

I now sat patiently down before the fire, resolved to spell over the
letter from beginning to end, and suffer nothing to escape me. All her
letters, like the preamble of a deed, began with a certain formula---a
species of lamentation over her wretched health; the difficulty of her
case, which, consisting in the absence of all symptoms, had puzzled the
Faculty for years long; the inclemency of the weather, which by some
fatality of fortune was sure to