Look here!" continued Jerry, dismounting and holding up the
ragged skirt of his coat, "couldn't you put a ball through this for
me?"--"'Tis riddled enough in all conscience, but here goes," said the
highwayman, firing off a pistol at it.--"Here's my ould caubeen now, and
I'll just give my face a scratch to draw the blood if you put a hole
through that too." The hat was riddled for him in the same way. "Well,
now, that's grand; but I think if the other skirt was tore, they couldn't
say a word then."--"Why, you omadhaun! haven't you enough of it? Give me
the rint. Do you think I have any more powder and ball to be wasting on
you, you spalpeen?"--"If you haven't, I have," cried Jerry, springing on
his horse, and pulling out a loaded pistol he was off and away before the
astonished highwayman had time to prevent him or to reload his weapon.

The legislative union forms a distinct epoch in Irish social life, and we
cannot more fitly close this paper than by giving an account of the last
meeting of the Irish House of Lords in the words of an observant and
dispassionate eye-witness. After expressing his surprise at the facility
with which their consent was gained, De Quincey adds: "They all rose from
their couches peers of Parliament, individual pillars of the realm,
indispensable parties to every law that could pass. To-morrow they will be
nobody--men of straw--_terrae filii_. What madness has persuaded them to
part with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their children
for ever into mere titular lords?... The bill received the royal assent
without a muttering or a whispering or the protesting echo of a sigh.
Perhaps there might be a little pause, a silence like that which follows
an earthquake, but there was no plainspoken Lord Belhaven, as on the
corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with: 'So
there's an end of an auld sang.' All was, or looked, courtly and free from
vulgar emotion. Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments and
installations and masked balls, with all other secondary splendors in
celebration of primary splendors, reflex glories that reverberated the
original glories, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis.
The 'season,' as it is called in great cities, was over--unfortunately,
the last season that was ever destined to illuminate the society or to
stimulate the domestic trade of Dublin."

ELIZA WILSON.

VINA'S "OLE MAN."

[Illustration