on, and yet I felt that strange impulse so strong in
the Irish peasant to narrate anything of a character which can interest
by harrowing and exciting the feelings.

Very little pressing was needed to make me recount the whole story,
down to the departure of my father with the other prisoners sentenced to
transportation.

"And whither were you going when I met you this morning on the common?"
said my fellow-traveller, in a voice of some interest.

"To seek my fortune, sir," was my brief answer; and either the words or
the way they were uttered seemed to strike my companion, for he drew
up short, and stared at me, repeating the phrase, "Seek your fortune!"
"Just so," said I, warmed by an enthusiasm which then was beginning to
kindle within me, and which for many a long year since, and in many a
trying emergency, has cheered and sustained me. "Just so; the world is
wide, and there 's a path for every one, if they 'd only look for it."

"But you saw what came of _my_ taking a short cut, this morning," said
my companion, laughing.

"And you'd have been time enough too, if you had been always thinking of
what you were about, sir; but as you told me, you began a thinking and
a dreaming of twenty things far away. Besides, who knows what good turn
luck may take, just at the very moment when we seem to have least of
it?"

"You 're quite a philosopher, Con," said he, smiling.

"So Father Mahon used to say, sir," said I, proudly, and in reality
highly flattered at the reiteration of the epithet.

Thus chatting, we journeyed along, lightening the way with talk, and
making the hours seem to me the very plea-santest I had ever passed. At
last we came in sight of the steeple of Kinnegad, which lay in the plain
before us, about a mile distant.

The little town of Kinnegad was all astir as we entered it The "up
mail" had just come down, in the main street, sending all its passengers
flying in various directions,--through shop-windows; into cow-houses and
piggeries; some being proudly perched on the roof of a cabin, and others
most ignobly seated on a dunghill; the most lamentable figure of all
being an elderly gentleman, who, having cut a summerset through an
apothecary's window, came forth cut by a hundred small vials, and
bearing on his person unmistakable evidence of every odor, from
tar-water to assafot-ida. The conveyance itself lay, like the Ark after
the Deluge, quietly reposing on one side; while animals male and femal