reflections? I must close them, and with
them my story at once.

"The few pounds I possessed in the world enabled me to reach Quebec,
and take my passage in a timber vessel bound for Cork. Why I returned to
Ireland, and with what intentions, I should be sorely puzzled, were you
to ask of me. Some vague, indistinct feeling of home, connected with my
birthplace had, perhaps, its influence over me. So it was--I did so.

[Editor's Note: Another edition of this book (Downey and
Co., 1897) was scannned for the middle part of this etext as
large portions of the original 1845 edition were defective.
The reader will note that the two editions initiate a quoted
passages in different ways: the 1845 edition with a double
quote and the 1897 edition with a single quotation mark.]

'After a good voyage of some five weeks, we anchored in Cove, where I
landed, and proceeded on foot to Tralee. It was night when I arrived. A
few faint glimmering lights could be seen here and there from an upper
window; but all the rest was in darkness. Instinctively I wandered on,
till I came to the little street where my aunt had lived. I knew every
stone in it. There was not a house I passed but I was familiar with all
its history. There was Mark Cassidy's provision store, as he proudly
called a long dark room, the ceiling thickly studded with hams and
bacon, coils of rope, candles, flakes of glue, and loaves of sugar;
while a narrow pathway was eked out below between a sugar-hogshead, some
sacks of flour and potatoes, hemp-seed, tar, and treacle, interspersed
with scythe-blades, reaping-hooks, and sweeping-brushes--a great
coffee-roaster adorning the wall, and forming a conspicuous object for
the wonderment of the country-people, who never could satisfy themselves
whether it was a new-fashioned clock or a weather-glass, or a little
thrashing-machine or a money-box. Next door was Maurice Fitzgerald's,
the apothecary, a cosy little cell of eight feet by six, where there was
just space left for a long-practised individual to grind with a pestle
without putting his right elbow through a blue-glass bottle that figured
in the front window, or his left into active intercourse with a regiment
of tinctures that stood up, brown and muddy and fetid, on a shelf hard
by. Then came Joe M'Evoy's, "licensed for spirits and enthertainment,"
where I had often stood as a boy to listen to the pleasant sounds of
Larry Branaghan's pipes,