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afore? I'd trouble yez to consider yourselves as temporary. There's great scholars among them ragged runagates, your honor, poor as they look: for though in these degendered times you won't get the childre, as formerly, to talk the dead languages, afore they can spake, when, says Campion, they had Latin like a vulgar tongue, conning in their schools of leachcraft the aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the civil institutes of the faculties, yet there are as fine scholars, and as good philosophers still, Sir, to be found in my seminary as in Trinity College, Dublin.-Now, step forward here, you Homers. "Keklute meu Troes, kai Dardanoi, ed' epikouroi.”

Half a dozen overgrown boys with bare heads and naked feet, hustled forward.

"Them's my first class, plaze your honor: sorrow one of them gassoons, but would throw you off a page of Homer into Irish while he'd be clampng a turf stack.-Come forward here,

Padreen Mahony, you little mitcher, ye.-Have you no better courtesy than that, Padreen? Fie, upon your manners. Then for all that, Sir, he's my head philosopher, and am getting him

up for Maynooth. Och! then I wouldn't axe better than to pit him against the provost of Trinity College this day, for all his ould small cloathes, Sir, the cratur! troth, he'd puzzle him, great as he is, aye, and bate him too; that's at the humanities, Sir. Padreen, my man, if the pig's sould at Dunore market to-morrow, tell your daddy dear, I'll expect the pintion. Is that your bow, Padreen, with your head under your arm like a roosting hen? Upon my word, I take shame for your manners. There, your honor, them's my cordaries, the little Leprehauns,* with their cathah heads, and their burned

*Leprehauns, one of the inferior order of Irish Demonology.

+ Cathah-curly, or matted.

VOL. I.

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skins: I think your honor would be divarted to hear them parsing a chapter-Well now, dismiss, lads, jewel-off with yez, extemplo, like a piper out of a tent; away with yez to the turf; and mind me well, ye Homers ye, I'll expect Hector and Andromach to-morrow without fail: obsarve me well, I'll take no excuse for the classics barring the bog, in respect of the weather's being dry: dismiss, I say." The learned disciples of this Irish sage, pulling down the front lock of their hair to designate the bow they would have made, if they had possessed hats to move, now scampered off, leaping over tomb-stones and clearing rocks; while O'Leary observed, shaking his head, and looking after them, "Not one of them but is sharp witted, and has a ganius for poethry, if there was any encouragement for larning in these degendered times."

Having now gratified his pedagogue pride, and excused the 'looped and win

dowed raggedness' of his pupils by extolling that which passeth shew, he now turned his whole attention on his guest, who stood shadowed by the deep arched door-case, waiting till the last of the boys had disappeared. O'Leary led the way before him into the interior of the chauntry, which was divided into the school-room, and his own abode; then laying down his Homer and ferule, and shutting the door almost to the exclusion of the light, and wiping down a seat with his wig, which lay on the desk, and which he afterwards placed on his head, he respectfully motioned his visitor to be seated. A silence for a moment nsued; when O'Leary, fixing his eyes into a look of expressive significance, observed, in a low cautious

tone:

"I axe your lordship's pardon for the great liberty I took in calling you, Sir, my lord; thinking it due discretion so to do before my scholars; in respect

of your intention of biding here in casu incognito."

"Indeed!" said the Commodore, starting on his feet: "for whom then do you take me?"

"For who you are-noble by blood, by birth, and by descent; and though no Irishman, but of Norman breed, a true Geraldine. And though the Fitzadelms are nothing to me now, for I have shook the dust off my feet at their threshold, and threw my ould couran* over the head of the last of the race, that shall ever give my heart a beat, or my eye a tear, yet I'd be sorry that it was to say, that a branch of the ould tree wanted a sheltering place, when I, Terence Oge O'Leary, the last Irish fosterer of the family, had a shed to housel him under."

"For whom, then," repeated the Commodore, in a calmer tone than he

* An Irish shoe or brogue, made without heels.

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