I trust I have said enough, to move the reader's pity and compassion for my situation--one more miserable it is difficult to conceive.

It may be though that much might be done by management, and that a slight exercise of the favourite Whig plan of concilliation, might avail.

Nothing of the kind.

She was proof against all such arts; and what was still worse, there was no subject, no possible circumstance, no matter, past, present, or to come, that she could not wind by her diabolical ingenuity, into some cause of offence; and then came the quick transition to instant punishment.

Thus, my apparently harmless inquiry as to the society of the neighbourhood, suggested to her--a wish on my part to make acquaintance--therefore to dine out--therefore not to dine at home--consequently to escape paying half-a-crown and devouring a chicken--therefore to defraud her, and behave, as she would herself observe, "like a beggarly scullion, with his four shillings a day, setting up for a gentleman," &c.
By a quiet and Job-like endurance of all manner of taunting suspicions, and unmerited sarcasms, to which I daily became more reconciled, I absolutely rose into something like favour; and before the first month of my banishment expired, had got the length of an invitation to tea, in her own snuggery--an honour never known to be bestowed on any before, with the exception of Father Malachi Brennan, her ghostly adviser; and even he, it is said, never ventured on such an approximation to intimacy, until he was, in Kilrush phrase, "half screwed," thereby meaning more than half tipsy.