Zounds!--it would be a nice night's work to go out for Willy Reilly and to bring home a beggar man in his place." This was a narrow escape upon the part of Fergus, who knew that if they had made' a prisoner of him, and produced him before Sir Robert Whitecraft, who was a notorious persecutor, and with whom the Red Rapparee was now located, he would unquestionably have been hanged like a dog.

The officer of the party, however--to wit, the worthy sergeant--was one of those men who love a drop of the native, and whose heart besides it expands into a sort of surly kindness that has something comical and not disagreeable in it.

In addition to this, he never felt a confidence in his own authority with half the swagger which he did when three quarters gone.

Steen and he were never friends, nor indeed was Steen ever a popular man among his acquaintances.

In matters of trade and business he was notoriously dishonest, and in the moral and social relations of life, selfish, uncandid, and treacherous.
The sergeant, on the other hand, though an out-spoken and flaming anti-Papist in theory, was, in point of fact, a good friend to his Roman Catholic neighbors, who used to say of him that his bark was worse than his bite.
When his party had passed on, Fergus stood for a moment uncertain as to where he should direct his steps.