le without a title, than an apothecary can deliver his physic without
a label. We shall, therefore, call it--

The Spectre Lovers

There lived some fifteen years since in a small and ruinous house, little
better than a hovel, an old woman who was reported to have considerably
exceeded her eightieth year, and who rejoiced in the name of Alice, or
popularly, Ally Moran. Her society was not much courted, for she was
neither rich, nor, as the reader may suppose, beautiful. In addition to a
lean cur and a cat she had one human companion, her grandson, Peter
Brien, whom, with laudable good nature, she had supported from the period
of his orphanage down to that of my story, which finds him in his
twentieth year. Peter was a good-natured slob of a fellow, much more
addicted to wrestling, dancing, and love-making, than to hard work, and
fonder of whiskey-punch than good advice. His grandmother had a high
opinion of his accomplishments, which indeed was but natural, and also of
his genius, for Peter had of late years begun to apply his mind to
politics; and as it was plain that he had a mortal hatred of honest
labour, his grandmother predicted, like a true fortuneteller, that he was
born to marry an heiress, and Peter himself (who had no mind to forego
his freedom even on such terms) that he was destined to find a pot of
gold. Upon one point both agreed, that being unfitted by the peculiar
bias of his genius for work, he was to acquire the immense fortune to
which his merits entitled him by means of a pure run of good luck. This
solution of Peter's future had the double effect of reconciling both
himself and his grandmother to his idle courses, and also of maintaining
that even flow of hilarious spirits which made him everywhere welcome,
and which was in truth the natural result of his consciousness of
approaching affluence.

It happened one night that Peter had enjoyed himself to a very late hour
with two or three choice spirits near Palmerstown. They had talked
politics and love, sung songs, and told stories, and, above all, had
swallowed, in the chastened disguise of punch, at least a pint of good
whiskey, every man.

It was considerably past one o'clock when Peter bid his companions
goodbye, with a sigh and a hiccough, and lighting his pipe set forth on
his solitary homeward way.

The bridge of Chapelizod was pretty nearly the midway point of his night
march, and from one cause or another his progress was rather