downcast, silent, and fitful, yet kind and affectionate old man. Her education had taken place altogether under her paternal roof, and Fitzmaurice had the happiness to find that he had not injured his daughter by neglecting the hints respecting a few years' boarding in Killarney convent, which some religious friends had scattered in his ear.

On the evening, and about (perhaps) the very period when Aylmer was conversing with the stranger in the Kerry mountains, the father and daughter were seated in the large, old-fashioned parlour, the window of which commanded, at a vast distance, a view of the hills or yet more gentle elevations of the soil which run along the line of coast, revealing at intervals certain glimpses of the blue waters of Dingle Bay, which were all massed at present in one glow of hazy splendour by the influence of the departing sun. Now and then a white sail, glancing like a speck of light on the waters, appeared and flitted across those scanty gaps in the horizon, all moving inland, and relieving by their motion and the associations which they waked up, a good deal of the still and monotonous repose of the interjacent prospect. The old man, who had been more than usually gloomy during the evening, and who had not spoken during several hours, now sat, his arm-chair drawn towards the window and fronting the distant bay, on which his eyes were fixed with an expression varied only in its intensity, but at all times stamped with the hue of a consistent and enduring melancholy. Kate, with the fineness of tact which long habit as well as native delicacy had given her, perceived that something had occurred during the course of the day, most of which he had spent at Bally-Aylmer, to agitate him, and she felt that it was one of those moments at which all interference with, or intrusion upon, his feelings, would jar against his very nature. She pursued her work therefore in silence, venturing only in an occasional impulse of anxiety to steal a glance from under her curved eye-lashes at his darkening,

dispirited countenance. Had Kate been gifted with any portion of physiognomical penetration, she might have read, in that apparently still and evenly dejected range of features, the influence of thoughts which should have excited her love, her pity, her sorrow, and her dismay, by turns. She might have beheld a long train of mournfully joyous associations, touched from their sleep by the influence of the sweet scene on which his eye was fixed, and awakening, in their turn, recollections still more remote, all blended and mixed up with the absorbing event in which all his misery had originated, and each bringing a new stimulant to the disease which that event, and its consequence, had occasioned in his mind.

While each thus followed up their own fancies "in social silence", the attention of Katharine was diverted by a light tapping at the parlour-door, which, opening presently after, admitted the tip of a polished, pretty nose, a blue eye, and a section of a broad, bold forehead. The blue eye was directed on the young mistress of the mansion, and the finger of a hand, yet reeking with soap suds, and of a wrinkled whiteness, was forth with protruded to beckon her from the apartment. Kate obeyed the action

in silence.

"What's the matter now, Norry?" said the young lady. "It's from Bally-Aylmer, miss", was the reply. "Sandy Culhane to be to the posht-office to day, and to have letters for yourself and himself".

Without waiting to hear more, her lively mistress bounded and skipped past the girl to the kitchen, where stood the welcome messenger, who had, it would seem, refused to deliver up his precious freight, until he should have received his albricias, either in smiles or commendations, from the lips of the "young missis herself, the darlen".

These letters were what Katharine judged them to be, the avant couriers of Aylmer's return, written about a

month before, and now almost overtaken by him, an event less usual in Irish post-offices at the present day than it was then, when there was no Sir Edward Lees to keep the machinery in working condition. More than half the delight which she felt, however, instantly referred itself to her parent, and her affectionate heart bounded at the thought, that she had at last found something with which she might venture to break in upon the gloom that had taken possession of his mind during the whole afternoon.

"I have news for you, sir", said she as she reëntered the apartment on tiptoe, her pretty lip pinched up to murder a smile that was still struggling for its life, her half-shut, gray, waggish eyes bent merrily on his, and her whole face beaming with a child-like, irrepressible delight. "Go, go, you little fool, mind your work".

"I know who will be the loser then ", retorted Kate, as with an affectation of hoydenish freedom, she leaned over the back of his chair, and flourished the letter before his eyes. "Who, monkey?"

"Do you know that hand?" replied Kate, slipping one soft white arm round her father's neck, and with the other holding the letter steadily before him, while she watched his countenance, as one would that of a child to whom one has just given a new gilt-covered picture-book. While Fitzmaurice put on his spectacles and glanced over the contents of the letter, she felt a quick and hurried pulsation beneath her hand, which at once induced her to withdraw it from his neck. Her intuitive delicacy of feeling made her shrink with scorn from the acquiring an insight into the soul of another by the use of any of those "points of cunnynge", of which my Lord Verulam, Bacon, gives us so elaborate and philosophical a detail.

"The third!" said Fitzmaurice, when he had concluded; "then I should not be surprised if we had him here this evening".

"This evening! O my!" exclaimed Kate, as she

glanced first at her dress, and then, involuntarily, at the ancient pier-glass, with its gorgeous volumes of gilded foliage, on the other side of the room.

"O my! O you! What you? Poh! what nonsense!" exclaimed Fitzmaurice, as he observed the direction which her eyes had taken. "This young man's arrival, Kate, seems to give you a great deal of pleasure".

Kate blushed, between a feeling of consciousness and of surprise, and without making any reply, she looked in her father's face with an expression of astonishment, confusion, and curiosity.

"To me", he continued replying to her gesture, " confess this intelligence brings no unmingled sensation. I believe I have done enough to show that I love young Aylmer well-I like him too, for his own gentle qualities, as much as for his name's sake; but I cannot forget, neither, that to that very name I owe the loss of all I prized in life-all my old friends-my good fame, my poor wife, your sweet mother, Kate, who was lying on a sick-bed when I was dragged from her side, to- and who mingled her death-groan with your first cry of sorrow, my girl, as she placed you in my arms. But these are unfair and selfish modes of feeling", he continued, as he saw a tear glisten in the eye of his daughter; "I must learn to conquer them. Only I would be alone for the rest of the evening". And kissing his daughter affectionately, the old man passed to his sleeping apartment.

During all this while Aylmer has been enjoying a comfortable sleep, and it is high time we should wake him up again for the amusement of our readers, or, to speak more modestly, for the furtherance of our story. The noon of a bright frosty day had just passed when he awoke. So heavy and unbroken had been his rest, that he could scarcely believe his eyes, when he saw the sunbeams strike on a point of noon which he remembered from his child

hood. Aylmer had not yet passed that happy season of life when novelty is enjoyment, and change of place and circumstance seems almost to imply change of being. As he opened his eyes on the old-fashioned curtains of his oldfashioned state bed, under whose lofty tester he had often reposed in childhood, and recognized the faces of many familiar friends on those hangings-the same pike-nosed grayhound, in the yet unaccomplished act of springing over the same barred gate, the same hunter, sticking in the same slough, and the same clumsy squire, kissing the same funny-looking, blowzy-cheeked milk-maid-it seemed to him as if the whole intervening space had been but the circle of one long night, and all its crowd of events and changes nothing more than the shadows of a vivid dream. When he flung back the curtains, however, and tossed his manly bulk out of bed, the sight of a tolerably rounded calf gave him, like the beard of Rip Van Winkle, assurance of their reality.

His toilet, and the preparations for it made by his old friend Ally, also reminded him of his change from Irish city to Irish country life. The luxury of soap was what she appeared to be totally unprovided with, from her having substituted in its place a handful of dry oatmeal, and a small, clean piggin-full of new milk, a quid-pro-quo by no means satisfactory to a young man whose darkening chin advised him of the necessity of raising a lather. He now perceived, what in the gray doubtful light of the morning dawn had escaped his observation, the extremely dilapidated state of the apartment in which he stood. The single window was eked out, half glass, half paper; and the shutters swung crazily on their hinges. The plastering of the ceiling, as well as of the walls, had fallen away in various places; and, on one side of the room where a partition divided it from the kitchen, this circumstance disclosed a secret of true Munster economy, creditable alike to the ancient and the present tenants of the