f country-people, in
whom, if language is to be trusted, the grievous wrongs of land-tenure
are painfully portrayed--nothing but complaint, dogged determination,
and resistance being heard on every side. Behind the bar is a long
low-ceilinged apartment, the parlour _par excellence_, only used by
distinguished visitors, and reserved on one especial evening of the
week for the meeting of the 'Goats,' as the members of a club call
themselves--the chief, indeed the founder, being our friend Mathew Kearney,
whose title of sovereignty was 'Buck-Goat,' and whose portrait, painted
by a native artist and presented by the society, figured over the
mantel-piece. The village Van Dyck would seem to have invested largely in
carmine, and though far from parsimonious of it on the cheeks and the nose
of his sitter, he was driven to work off some of his superabundant stock
on the cravat, and even the hands, which, though amicably crossed in front
of the white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent
deed of blood. The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however,
reassuring. Nor--except a decided squint, by which the artist had
ambitiously attempted to convey a humoristic drollery to the expression--is
there anything sinister in the portrait.

An inscription on the frame announces that this picture of their respected
founder was presented, on his fiftieth birthday, 'To Mathew Kearney, sixth
Viscount Kilgobbin'; various devices of 'caprine' significance, heads,
horns, and hoofs, profusely decorating the frame. If the antiquary should
lose himself in researches for the origin of this society, it is as well
to admit at once that the landlord's sign of the 'Blue Goat' gave the
initiative to the name, and that the worthy associates derived nothing
from classical authority, and never assumed to be descendants of fauns or
satyrs, but respectable shopkeepers of Moate, and unexceptional judges of
'poteen.' A large jug of this insinuating liquor figured on the table, and
was called 'Goat's-milk'; and if these humoristic traits are so carefully
enumerated, it is because they comprised all that was specially droll
or quaint in these social gatherings, the members of which were a very
commonplace set of men, who discussed their little local topics in very
ordinary fashion, slightly elevated, perhaps, in self-esteem, by thinking
how little the outer world knew of their dulness and dreariness.

As the meetings were usually dete