The great people and the quality--ax your pardon; but sure isn't it true, Mister Charles ?--they don't fret so much after their fathers and brothers, and they care little who's driving them, whether it was a decent, respectable man like my father, or a chap with a grin on him like a rat-trap.

And so it happened that my father used to travel half the county; going here and there wherever there was trade stirring; and faix, a man didn't think himself rightly buried if my father wasn't there; for ye see, he knew all about it: he could tell to a quart of spirits what would be wanting for a wake; he knew all the good criers for miles round; and I've heard it was a beautiful sight to see him standing on a hill, arranging the procession as they walked into the churchyard, and giving the word like a captain,-- "'Come on, the stiff; now the friends of the stiff; now the pop'lace.' "That's what he used to say, and troth he was always repeating it, when he was a little gone in drink,--for that's the time his spirits would rise, and he'd think he was burying half Munster.
"And sure it was a real pleasure and a pride to be buried in them times; for av it was only a small farmer with a potato garden, my father would come down with the black cloak on him, and three yards of crape behind his hat, and set all the children crying and yelling for half a mile round; and then the way he'd walk before them with a spade on his shoulder, and sticking it down in the ground, clap his hat on the top of it, to make it look like a chief mourner.

It was a beautiful sight!" "But Mike, if you indulge much longer in this flattering recollection of your father, I'm afraid we shall lose sight of the ghost entirely." "No fear in life, your honor; I'm coming to him now.

Well, it was this way it happened: In the winter of the great frost, about forty-two or forty-three years ago, the ould priest of Tullonghmurray took ill and died.
He was sixty years priest of the parish, and mightily beloved by all the people, and good reason for it; a pleasanter man, and a more social crayture never lived,--'twas himself was the life of the whole country-side.

A wedding nor a christening wasn't lucky av he wasn't there, sitting at the top of the table, with may be his arm round the bride herself, or the baby on his lap, a smoking jug of punch before him, and as much kindness in his eye as would make the fortunes of twenty hypocrites if they had it among them.