ell also; indeed, for that matter, the difficulty would
have been to find a house in the whole district that Larry would not
have been welcome in.

"So here you are at last, Larry," said old O'Hara; "I was wondering you
were not here long ago."

"An' so I would, I thank you kindly," said Larry, "only I overtook owld
Hoppy here, on the road, and sure I thought I might as well take my
time, and wait for poor Hoppy, and bring my welkim along with me;" and
here he shoved the fiddler into the house before him.

"The girls will be glad to see the pair o' yiz," said the old man,
following.

The interior of the house was crowded with guests, and the usual
laughing and courting so often described, as common to such
assemblages, were going forward amongst the young people. At the
farther end of the largest room in the cottage, a knot of the older men
of the party was engaged in the discussion of some subject that seemed
to carry deep interest along with it, and at the opposite extremity of
the same room, a coffin of very rude construction lay on a small table;
and around this coffin stood all the junior part of the company, male
and female, and the wildness of their mirth, and the fertility of their
jests, over this tenement of mortality and its contents, might have
well startled a stranger for a moment, until he saw the nature of the
deposit the coffin contained. Enshrouded in a sheaf of wheat lay a
pig, between whose open jaws a large potato was placed, and the coffin
was otherwise grotesquely decorated.

The reader will wonder, no doubt, at such an exhibition, for certainly
never was coffin so applied before; and it is therefore necessary to
explain the meaning of all this, and I believe Ireland is the only
country in the world where the facts I am about to relate could have
occurred.

It may be remembered that some time previously to the date at which my
story commences, his majesty's ministers declared that there should be
a "total extinction of tithes."

This declaration was received in Ireland by the great mass of the
people with the utmost delight, as they fancied they should never have
tithes to pay again. The peasantry in the neighbourhood of Templemore
formed the very original idea of burying the tithe. It is only amongst
an imaginative people that such a notion could have originated; and
indeed there is something highly poetical in the conception. The
tithe--that which the poor felt the keenest; that whi