and I only wish, as I am a bachelor not
further than my forty-fourth, that I may ever have the happiness to get
such a glance from two blue eyes, as she gave him that moment--a faint
smile played about her mouth, and a slight blush lit up her fair cheek,
like the evening sunbeams on the virgin snow, as the poets have said for
the five-hundredth time, to my own personal knowledge. She then extended
her hand, which John, you may be sure, was no way backward in receiving,
and the tears of love and gratitude ran silently down her cheeks.

"It is not necessary to detail the circumstances of this day farther;
let it be sufficient to say, that a reconciliation took place between
those two branches of the O'Hallaghan and O'Callaghan families, in
consequence of John's heroism and Rose's soft persuasion, and that there
was, also, every perspective of the two factions being penultimately
amalgamated. For nearly a century they had been pell-mell at it,
whenever and wherever they could meet. Their forefathers, who had been
engaged in the lawsuit about the island which I have mentioned, wore
dead and petrified in their graves; and the little peninsula in the glen
was gradationally worn away by the river, till nothing remained but
a desert, upon a small scale, of sand and gravel. Even the ruddy,
able-bodied squire, with the longitudinal nose, projecting out of his
face like a broken arch, and the small, fiery magistrate--both of whom
had fought the duel, for the purpose of setting forth a good example,
and bringing the dispute to a peaceable conclusion--were also dead. The
very memory of the original contention! had been lost (except that it
was preserved along with the cranium of my grandfather), or became so
indistinct that the parties fastened themselves on some more modern
provocation, which they kept in view until another fresh motive would
start up, and so on. I know not, however, whether it was fair to expect
them to give up at once the agreeable recreation of fighting. It's not
easy to abolish old customs, particularly diversions; and every one
knows that this is our national amusement.

"There were, it is true, many among both, factions who saw the matter in
this reasonable light, and who wished rather, if it were to cease, that
it should die away by degrees, from the battle of the whole parish,
equally divided between the factions, to the subordinate row between
certain members of them--from that to the faint broil of certai