cases.

It lifted him into a different sphere of companionship and suggested new
habits of life. No longer necessitated to labor daily for his bread,
by a very slight exercise of industry he could cultivate his
"potato-garden;" and every one who knows anything of Ireland well knows
that the potato and its corollary, the pig, supply every want of an
Irish cottier household.

Being thus at liberty to dispose of himself and his time, my parent was
enabled to practise a long-desired and much-coveted mode of life; which
was to frequent "sheebeens" and alehouses, and all similar places of
resort,--not, indeed, for the gratification of any passion for drink,
for my father only indulged when he was "treated," and never could bring
himself to spend a farthing in liquor himself, but his great fondness
for these places took its origin in his passion for talk. Never, indeed,
lived there a man--from Lord Brougham himself downwards--who had a
greater taste for gossip and loquaciousness than my father. It mattered
little what the subject, he was always ready; and whether it were a
crim. con. in the newspapers, a seizure for rent, a marriage in
high life, or a pig in the pound,--there he was, explaining away all
difficult terms of law and jurisprudence; and many a difficulty that Tom
Cafferty, the postmaster, had attempted in vain to solve was, by a kind
of "writ of error," removed to my father's court for explanation and
decision.

That he soon became a kind of authority in the neighboring town of
Kilbeggan need not excite any surprise. It is men of precisely his kind,
and with talents of an order very similar to his, that wield influence
in the great cities of the earth. It is your talking, pushing, forward
men, seeming always confident in what they say, never acknowledging an
error nor confessing a defeat, who take the lead in life. With average
ability, and ten times the average assurance, they reach the goal that
bashful merit never even so much as gets within sight of.

His chief resort, however, was the Court of Quarter Sessions, where he
sat from the first opening case to the last judgment, watching with an
intense interest all the vacillating changes of the law's uncertainty,
which unquestionably were not in any way diminished by the singular
individual who presided in that seat of justice. Simon Ball, or, as he
was better known at the bar, Snow Ball,--an epithet he owed to his white
head and eyebrows,--had qualified himse