like yerself may be."

"Here's long life to the first you have yerself, any way, Miss
Tierney!" and he finished the glass, of which the blushing beauty had
drunk half. "Might a boy make a guess who'd be the father of it?"

"Go asy now, masther Morty,"--the swain rejoiced in the name of
Mortimer Kelley. "It'll be some quiet, dacent fellow, that an't given
to chaffing nor too fond of sperrits."

"By dad, my darling, and an't that me to a hair's breadth?"

"Is it you a dacent, asy boy?"

"Shure if it an't me, where's sich a one in the counthry at all? And
it's I'd be fond of the child--and the child's mother more especial,"
and he gave her a loving squeeze, which in a less energetic society
might have formed good ground for an action for violent assault.

"Ah don't! Go asy I tell you, Morty. But come, an't you going to
dance instead of wasting your time here all night?" and the pair,
re-invigorated by their intellectual and animal refreshment, again
commenced their dancing.

Whilst the fun was going on fast and furious among the dancers, those
in the inner room were not less busily engaged. Brady was still
sitting in the chair which he had occupied during the supper, at the
bottom of the table, though he had turned round a little towards the
fire. At the further end of it Thady was seated, with a lighted pipe
in his mouth, and a tumbler of punch on the shelf over the fireplace.
Joe Reynolds was seated a little behind, but between Thady and Pat
Brady; and a lot of others were standing around, or squatting on the
end of the table--leaning against the fireplace, or sitting two on a
chair, wherever two had been lucky enough to secure one between them.
They were all drinking, most of them raw spirits--and all of them
smoking. At the other end of the room, three or four boys and girls
were standing in the door-way, looking at the dancing, and getting
cool after their own performances; and Denis McGovery was sitting in
the chair which Father John had occupied, with his head on the table,
apparently asleep, but more probably intent on listening to what was
going on among them at the other end of the room, whom he so strongly
suspected of some proposed iniquity. The noise, however, of the music
and the dancing, the low tones in which the suspected parties spoke,
and the distance at which they sat, must have made Denis's occupation
of eaves-dropping difficult, if not impracticable.

Thady had just been speaking, and it was