out twice or thrice a week,
plenty of snipe-shooting, and a beautiful race-course was made round
the lawn: and though I wasn't quite of an age to join in these
pleasures myself, I had a lively taste for them all, and relished
the free-and-easy style of my father's house, without any unhappy
forebodings, that the amusements there practised would end in leaving
me-a beggar.

"Now, my Aunt Judy lived in what might be called, a state of
painfully-elegant poverty. Her habitation was somewhat more capacious
than a house in a toy-shop; but then it had all the usual attributes of
a house. There was a hall-door, and two windows, and a chimney, and a
brass knocker, and, I believe, a scraper; and within, there were three
little rooms, about the dimensions of a mail-coach, each. I think I see
the little parlour before me, now this minute; there was a miniature of
my father in a red coat over the chimney, and two screens painted by my
aunt--landscapes, I am told, they were once; but time and damp had made
them look something like the moon seen through a bit of smoked glass;
and there were fire-irons as bright as day, for they never performed any
other duty than standing on guard beside the grate,--a kind of royal
beef-eaters, kept for show; and there was a little table covered with
shells and minerals, bits of coral, conchs, and cheap curiosities of
that nature, and over them, again, was a stuffed macaw. Oh, dear! I see
it all before me, and the little tea-service, that if the beverage
had been vitriol, a cup full couldn't have harmed you. There were four
chairs;--human ingenuity couldn't smuggle in a fifth. There was one for
Father Donnellan, another for Mrs. Brown, the post mistress, another for
the barrack-master, Captain Dwyer, the fourth for my aunt herself; but
then no more were wanted. Nothing but real gentility, the 'ould Irish
blood,' would be received by Miss Judy; and if the post-mistress wasn't
fourteenth cousin to somebody, who was aunt to Phelim O'Brien, who was
hanged for some humane practice towards the English in former times,
the devil a cup of bohea she'd have tasted there! The priest was
_ex officio_, but Captain Dwyer was a gentleman, born and bred. His
great-grandfather had an estate; the last three generations had lived
on the very reputation of its once being in the family: '_they_ weren't
upstarts, no, sorrow bit of it;' when they had it they spent it,' and so
on, were the current expressions concerning them