slip in the street of it, be the
help of God ye were always sure to fall into a public-house!'

"We had better not tell the full particulars of this journey to
Salemina," said Francesca prudently, as we rumbled along; "though,
oddly enough, if you remember, whenever any one speaks disparagingly of
Ireland, she always takes up cudgels in its behalf."

"Francesca, now that you are within three or four months of being
married, can you manage to keep a secret?"

"Yes," she whispered eagerly, squeezing my hand and inclining her
shoulder cosily to mine. "Yes, oh yes, and how it would raise my spirits
after a sleepless night!"

"When Salemina was eighteen she had a romance, and the hero of it was
the son of an Irish gentleman, an M.P., who was travelling in America,
or living there for a few years,--I can't remember which. He was nothing
more than a lad, less than twenty-one years old, but he was very much in
love with Salemina. How far her feelings were involved I never knew,
but she felt that she could not promise to marry him. Her mother was an
invalid, and her father a delightful, scholarly, autocratic, selfish old
gentleman, who ruled his household with a rod of iron. Salemina coddled
and nursed them both during all her young life; indeed, little as she
realised it, she never had any separate existence or individuality until
they both died, when she was thirty-one or two years old."

"And what became of the young Irishman? Was he faithful to his first
love, or did he marry?"

"He married, many years afterward, and that was the time I first
heard the story. His marriage took place in Dublin, on the very day,
I believe, that Salemina's father was buried; for Fate has the most
relentless way of arranging these coincidences. I don't remember his
name, and I don't know where he lives or what has become of him. I
imagine the romance has been dead and buried in rose-leaves for years;
Salemina never has spoken of it to me, but it would account for her
sentimental championship of Ireland."

Chapter IX. The light of other days.

'Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber's chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me.'
Thomas Moore.

If you want to fall head over ears in love with Ireland at the very
first sight of her charms, take, as we did, the steamer from Cappoquin
to Youghal, and float down the vale of the Blackwater--

'Swift Awn