Ballycloran; and a perfect stranger
he must have been, for he absolutely raised the lion-headed, rusty
knocker, and knocked at the door--a ceremony to which the customary
visitors of the house never dreamed of having recourse. So unusual
was this proceeding, that it frightened the sole remaining domestic,
Katty, out of all her decorum. It will be remembered that Mary Brady
had absconded with Biddy. Poor Katty did not well know how to act
under the trying emergencies of the case; she could not get to the
door of Miss Feemy's parlour, as a strange gentleman was standing
in the hall, so she ran round the house, and ascertaining that the
intruder was well in the hall, and could not see her, she clambered
up to her mistress's window, and exclaimed,

"Hist! Miss Feemy, there's a sthranger gintleman a rapping at the big
knocker, and I think it's the fat lawyer from Carrick; what'll I do
thin, Miss?"

"Why, you fool!" whispered Feemy through one of the broken panes of
glass, "go and ask him who he wants, and tell him Thady an't at
home."

So Katty dropped from the window-sill again, and went to receive the
gentleman into the house by following him in at the hall door. By the
time, however, that she had entered herself, old Larry Macdermot had
been aroused out of his lethargy by a third knocking of the stranger;
and on opening his own parlour door, was startled to see Mr. Hyacinth
Keegan, the attorney from Carrick on Shannon, standing before him.

Mr. Hyacinth Keegan requires some little introduction, as he is one
of the principal personages of my tale. As Father Cullen before
remarked, his father was a process-server living at a small town
called Drumshambo;--that is, he obtained his bread by performing
the legal acts to which Irish landlords are so often obliged to
have resort in obtaining their rent from their tenants. This
process-server was a poor man, and a Roman Catholic, but he had
managed to give his son a decent education; he had gotten him a place
as an errand boy in an attorney's office, from whence he had risen to
the dignity of clerk, and he was now, not only an attorney himself,
but a flourishing one, and a Protestant to boot. His great step in
the world had been his marriage with Sally Flannelly,--that Sally
whom Macdermot had rejected,--for from the time of his wedding he had
much prospered in all worldly things. He was a hardworking man, and
in that consisted his only good quality; he was plausible, a goo