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Dunphy visits the County Wicklow.
-- Old Sam and his Wife.
It was about a week subsequent to the interview which the stranger had with old Dunphy, unsuccessful as our readers know it to have been, that the latter and his wife were sitting in the back parlor one night after their little shop had been closed, when the following dialogue took place between them: "Well, at all events," observed the old man, "he was the best of them, and to my own knowledge that same saicret lay hot and heavy on his conscience, especially to so good a master and mistress as they were to him.

The truth is, Polly, I'll do it." "But why didn't he do it himself ?" asked his wife.
"Why ?--why ?" he replied, looking at her with his keen ferret eyes--"why, don't you know what a weak-minded, timorsome creature he was, ever since the height o' my knee ?" "Oh, ay," she returned; "and I hard something about an oath, I think, that they made him take." "You did," said her husband; "and it was true, too.

They swore him never to breathe a syllable of it until his dying day--an' although they meant by that that he should never reveal it at all, yet he always was of opinion that he might tell it on that day, but on no other one.

And it was his intention to do so." "Wasn't it an unlucky thing that she happened to be out when he could do it with a safe conscience ?" observed his wife.
"They almost threatened the life out of the poor creature," pursued her husband, "for Tom threatened to murder him if he betrayed them; and Ginty to poison him, if Tom didn't keep his word--and I believe in my sowl that the same devil's pair would a' done either the one or the other, if he had broken his oath.