Here was the old Galway squire, with an ancestry that reached to Noah, sitting side by side with the poor cotter, whose whole earthly possession was what, in Irish phrase, is called a "potato garden,"-- meaning the exactly smallest possible patch of ground out of which a very Indian-rubber conscience could presume to vote.

Here sat the old simple-minded, farmer-like man, in close conversation with a little white-foreheaded, keen-eyed personage, in a black coat and eye-glass,--a flash attorney from Dublin, learned in flaws of the registry, and deep in the subtleties of election law.

There was an Athlone horse-dealer, whose habitual daily practices in imposing the halt, the lame, and the blind upon the unsuspecting, for beasts of blood and mettle, well qualified him for the trickery of a county contest.

Then there were scores of squireen gentry, easily recognized on common occasions by a green coat, brass buttons, dirty cords, and dirtier top-boots, a lash-whip, and a half-bred fox-hound; but now, fresh-washed for the day, they presented something the appearance of a swell mob, adjusted to the meridian of Galway.

A mass of frieze-coated, brow-faced, bullet-headed peasantry filled up the large spaces, dotted here and there with a sleek, roguish-eyed priest, or some low electioneering agent detailing, for the amusement of the company, some of those cunning practices of former times which if known to the proper authorities would in all likelihood cause the talented narrator to be improving the soil of Sidney, or fishing on the banks of the Swan river; while at the head and foot of each table sat some personal friend of my uncle, whose ready tongue, and still readier pistol, made him a personage of some consequence, not more to his own people than to the enemy.