CHAPTER VI.
THE 'BLUE GOAT' The 'Blue Goat' in the small town of Moate is scarcely a model hostel.
The entrance-hall is too much encumbered by tramps and beggars of various orders and ages, who not only resort there to take their meals and play at cards, but to divide the spoils and settle the accounts of their several 'industries,' and occasionally to clear off other scores which demand police interference.

On the left is the bar; the right-hand being used as the office of a land-agent, is besieged by crowds of country-people, in whom, if language is to be trusted, the grievous wrongs of land-tenure are painfully portrayed--nothing but complaint, dogged determination, and resistance being heard on every side.

Behind the bar is a long low-ceilinged apartment, the parlour _par excellence_, only used by distinguished visitors, and reserved on one especial evening of the week for the meeting of the 'Goats,' as the members of a club call themselves--the chief, indeed the founder, being our friend Mathew Kearney, whose title of sovereignty was 'Buck-Goat,' and whose portrait, painted by a native artist and presented by the society, figured over the mantel-piece.

The village Van Dyck would seem to have invested largely in carmine, and though far from parsimonious of it on the cheeks and the nose of his sitter, he was driven to work off some of his superabundant stock on the cravat, and even the hands, which, though amicably crossed in front of the white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent deed of blood.

The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however, reassuring.