I told you they were wise people in the west; this was their calculation: the line--ours was the Roscommon militia--are here to-day, there to-morrow; they may be flirting in Tralee this week, and fighting on the Tagus the next; not that there was any fighting there in those times, but then there was always Nova Scotia and St.John's, and a hundred other places that a Galway young lady knew nothing about, except that people never came back from them.

Now, what good, what use was there in falling in love with them?
Mere transitory and passing pleasure that was.

But as for us: there we were; if not in Kilkenny we were in Cork.

Safe out and come again; no getting away under pretence of foreign service; no excuse for not marrying by any cruel pictures of the colonies, where they make spatch-cocks of the officers' wives and scrape their infant families to death with a small tooth-comb.

In a word, my dear O'Mealey, we were at a high premium; and even O'Shaughnessy, with his red head and the legs you see, had his admirers.