nscript
of what takes place during the stations which are held there in the
summer months.

Having returned from this, I knew not exactly how to dispose of myself.
On one thing I was determined--never to enter the Church;--but this
resolution I kept faithfully to myself. I had nothing for it now but to
forget my sacerdotal prospects, which, as I have said, had already been
renounced, or to sink down as many others like me had done, into a mere
tiller of the earth,--a character in Ireland far more unpopular than
that which the Scotch call "a sticket minister!"

It was about this period, that chance first threw the inimitable
Adventures of the renowned Gil Bias across my path. During my whole
life I had been an insatiable reader of such sixpenny romances and
history-books as the hedge-schools afforded. Many a time have I given
up my meals rather than lose one minute from the interest excited by
the story I was perusing. Having read _Gil Bias_, however, I felt an
irrepressible passion for adventure, which nothing could divert; in
fact, I was as much the creature of the impulse it excited, as the ship
is of the helmsman, or the steam-engine of the principle that guides it.

Stimulated by this romantic love of adventure, I left my native place,
and directed my steps to the parish of Killanny, in the county of Louth,
the Catholic clergyman of which was a nephew of our own Parish Priest,
brother to him who proposed going to Munster with me, and an old
school-fellow of my own, though probably twenty years my senior. This
man's residence was within a quarter or half a mile's distance of the
celebrated Wild-goose Lodge, in which, some six months before, a
whole family, consisting of, I believe, eight persons, men, women, and
children, had been, from motives of personal vengeance, consumed to
ashes. I stopped with him for a fortnight, and succeeded in procuring
a tuition in the house of a wealthy farmer named Piers Murphy, near
Corcreagh. This, however, was a tame life, and a hard one, so I resolved
once more to give up a miserable salary and my board, for the fortunate
chances which an ardent temperament and a strong imagination perpetually
suggested to me as likely to be evolved out of the vicissitudes of life.
Urged on, therefore, by a spirit of romance, I resolved to precipitate
myself on the Irish Metropolis, which I accordingly entered with two
shillings and ninepence in my pocket; an utter stranger, of course
friendless;