CHAPTER I .-- An Adventure and an Escape.
Spirit of George Prince Regent James, Esq., forgive me this commencement! * * I mean no offence whatsoever to this distinguished and multitudinous writer; but the commencement of this novel really resembled that of so many of his that I was anxious to avoid the charge of imitating him.
It was one evening at the close of a September month and a September day that two equestrians might be observed passing along one of those old and lonely Irish roads that seemed, from the nature of its construction, to have been paved by a society of antiquarians, if a person could judge from its obsolete character, and the difficulty, without risk of neck or limb, of riding a horse or driving a carriage along it.

Ireland, as our English readers ought to know, has always been a country teeming with abundance--a happy land, in which want, destitution, sickness, and famine have never been felt or known, except through the mendacious misrepresentations of her enemies.

The road we speak of was a proof of this; for it was evident to every observer that, in some season of superabundant food, the people, not knowing exactly how to dispose of their shilling loaves, took to paving the common roads with them, rather than they should be utterly useless.

These loaves, in the course of time, underwent the process of petrifaction, but could not, nevertheless, be looked upon as wholly lost to the country.

A great number of the Irish, within six of the last preceding years--that is, from '46 to '52--took a peculiar fancy for them as food, which, we presume, caused their enemies to say that we then had hard times in Ireland.