had been
been by many a subtlety, to effect a compromise, which I did thus:
my patron being cast in the costs of all the damages to the amount of
twenty shillings, and the original contract to be maintained in all its
integrity.

The young man paid the money without speaking; but I had time to mark
that the purse from which he drew it was far from weighty. "Are we free
to go at last?" cried he, in a voice of suppressed wrath.

"Yes, yer honor; all's right," answered Andy, whose heart was mollified
at the sight of money. "A pleasant journey, and safe to ye; take good
care of the beast, don't ride her over the stones, and--"

The remainder of the exhortation was lost to us, as we set forth in a
short jog-trot, I running alongside.

"When we are once below the hill, yonder," said I to my companion, "give
her the whip, and make up for lose time."

"And how are you to keep up, my lad?" asked he, in some surprise.

I could scarcely avoid a laugh at the simplicity of the question; as
if an Irish gossoon, with his foot on his native bog, would n't be an
overmatch in a day's journey for the best hack that ever ambled! Away we
went, sometimes joking over, sometimes abusing, the old miser Andy, of
whom, for my fellow-traveller's amusement, I told various little traits
and stories, at which he laughed with a zest quite new to me to witness.
My desire to be entertaining then led me on to speak of my father and
his many curious adventures,--the skill with which he could foment
litigation, and the wily stratagems by which he sustained it afterwards.
All the cunning devices of the process-server I narrated with a gusto
that smacked of my early training: how, sometimes, my crafty parent
would append a summons to the collar of a dog, and lie in wait till
he saw the owner take it off and read it, and then, emerging from his
concealment, cry out "sarved," and take to his heels; and again how he
once succeeded in "serving" old Andy himself, by appearing as a beggar
woman, and begging him to light a bit of paper to kindle her pipe.
The moment, however, he took the bit of twisted paper, the assumed
beggar-woman screamed out, "Andy, yer sarved: that's a process, my
man!" The shock almost took Andy's life; and there's not a beggar in the
barony dares to come near him since.

"Your father must be well off, then, I suppose," said my companion.

"He was a few weeks ago, sir; but misfortune has come on us since that."
I was ashamed to go