nsider him handsome, and at another his
countenance filled you with an impression of repugnance, if not of
absolute aversion; so stern and inhuman were the characteristics which
you read in it. His hair, beard, and eye-brows were an ebon black, as
were his eyes; his features were hard and massive; his nose, which was
somewhat hooked, but too much pointed, seemed as if, while in a plastic
state, it had been sloped by a trowel towards one side of his face, a
circumstance which, while taken in connection with his black whiskers
that ran to a point near his mouth, and piercing eyes, that were too
deeply and narrowly set, gave him, aided by his heavy eyebrows, an
expression at once of great cruelty and extraordinary cunning. This
man, while travelling in the same direction with the other, had suffered
himself to be overtaken by him: in such a manner, however, that their
coming in contact could not be attributed to any particular design on
his part.

"Why, then, _Donnel Dhu_," said the farmer, "sure it's a sight for sore
eyes to see you in this side of the country; an' now that I do see you,
how are you?"

"Jist the ould six-an'-eight-pence, Jerry; an' how is the Sullivan
blood in you, man alive? good an' ould blood it is, in troth; how is the
family?"

"Why we can't--hut, what was I goin' to say?" replied his companion; "we
can't--complain--ershi--mishi!--why, then, God help us, it's we that can
complain, Donnel, if there was any use in it; but, mavrone, there isn't;
so all I can say is, that we're jist mixed middlin', like the praties in
a harvest, or hardly that same, indeed, since this woful change that has
come on us."

"Ay, ay," replied the other; "but if that change has come on you, you
know it didn't come without warnin' to the counthry; there's a man
livin' that foretould as much--that seen it comin'--ay, ever since
the pope was made prisoner, for that was what brought Bonaparte's
fate--that's now the cause of the downfall of everything upon him."

"An' it was the hard fate for us, as well as for himself," replied
Sullivan, "little he thought, or little he cared, for what he made us
suffer, an' for what he's makin' us suffer still, by the come-down that
the prices have got."

"Well, but he's sufferin' himself more than any of us," replied Donnel;
"however, that was prophesied too; it's read of in the ould Chronicles.
'An eagle will be sick,' says St. Columbkill, 'but the bed of the sick
eagle is not a tree, b