mmer,--could not but exalt them in my esteem
as the most patient set of varlets I had ever sojourned with. To my
question as to why we were going so far, and whither our journey tended,
I got for answer the one short reply,--"We must go to 'ould Betty's.'"

Now, as I would willingly spare as much of this period's recital to my
reader as I can, I will content myself with stating that "ould Betty,"
or Betty Cobbe, was an old lady who kept a species of ordinary for the
unclaimed youth of Dublin. They were fed and educated at her seminary;
the washing cost little, and they were certainly "done" for at the very
smallest cost, and in the most remarkably brief space of time. If ever
these faint memorials of a life should be read in a certain far-off
land, more than one settler in the distant bush, more than one angler in
the dull stream of Swan River, will confess how many of his first sharp
notions of life and manners were imbibed from the training nurture of
Mrs. Elizabeth Cobbe.

Betty's proceedings, for some years before I had the honor and felicity
of her acquaintance, had attracted towards her the attention of the
authorities.

The Colonial Secretary had possibly grown jealous; for she had been
pushing emigration to Norfolk Island on a far wider scale than ever
a cabinet dreamed of; and thus had she acquired what, in the polite
language of our neighbors, is phrased the "Surveillance of the
Police,"--a watchful superintendence and anxious protectorate, for
which, I grieve to say, she evinced the very reverse of gratitude.
Betty had, in consequence, and in requirement with the spirit of the
times--the most capricious spirit that ever vexed plain, old-fashioned
mortals--reformed her establishment; and from having opened her doors,
as before, to what, in the language of East Indian advertisements, are
called "a few spirited young men," she had fallen down to that small
fry who, in various disguises of vagrancy and vagabondage, infest the
highways of a capital.

By these disciples she was revered and venerated; their devotion was the
compensation for the world's neglect, and so she felt it. To train them
up with a due regard to the faults and follies of their better-endowed
neighbors was her aim and object, and to such teaching her knowledge of
Dublin life and people largely contributed.

Her original walk had been minstrelsy; she was the famous ballad-singer
of Drogheda Street, in the year of the rebellion of '98. She h