of the many modes of life open where there is
a quick demand for men. He clung to his
bit of land with desperation. When it was
torn from him he became desperate; from his
despair arose those terrible associations, to
which Captain Rock and other equally famed
and famous desperadoes give their names.

Kiltubby was a nice little village, while
things went well. Its landlord—one of the
numerous tribe of the Masseys—had a
handsome house upon the hill, amid the short
limestone sward that the sheep like to nibble.
The lady drove to church in a yellow chariot;
the husband had his hunters and his kennel.
And, after all, the chariot might not have
rolled him out of existence, nor his hounds
and horses have eaten their own heads off and
his too, had it not been for a frantic resolve of
Mr. Massey to drink claret and to grow claret.
A squire of no greater degree in the county of
Tipperary did the same. Claret was not grown
in the Golden Vale, and had to be paid
at last with much more produce of the said
Vale than when the debt was contemplated
or incurred. At last the wine-merchant
employed his solicitor, and Mr. Massey transferred
himself and family from the Golden
Vale of Tipperary to a little Dutch château,
situated on an elegant canal within view of
the steeples of Bruges.

In order to relate how and by whom Mr.
Massey left his property to be managed, it is
necessary to give some further and more
detailed account of Kiltubby, and its principal
inhabitants. The village had been much
distracted and divided by a feud, that had
raged from their earliest days between two of
the cleverest boys of the place. Clever, in the
Tipperary tongue, means six feet high, with
shoulders, limbs, and sinews in proportion.
But the cleverness of Tim Eyan and Mike
Doolan of Kiltubby reached a great stroke
higher than their athletic powers. There
had been a capital hedge-school at Kiltubby;
that is, there had been a man, who for a few
meals of potatoes would, in the summer days,
instruct under a hedge all the little gossoons
of the village. A few of the most capable of
them actually learned to read in this great
hall of education, and to know English. These
two accomplishments enabled the successful
achievers, among them our two worthies,
to proceed to a mighty fine school further
up the Vale, where a much greater pedagogue
in a brown wig knew Latin and Greek, and
taught both, as well as 'rithmetic, and a very
irregular course of mathematics. More than
one of these hedge and half-hedge scholars
contrived to make their Tipperary learning the
stepping-stone to a university education,
although classical learning, as a native of the
hedges, flourished far more and better down
in the depths of Munster than in Tipperary.

Tim Ryan and .Mike Doolan took, each
what suited him, out of the primary and
secondary schooling thus obtained. And
if they grumbled, it was not because of their
liking the same portions and tit-bits of the
dish of education. Mike swallowed the
'rithmetic, and Tim the rythm; for their
teachers were great at prosody, and of course
at poesy—in the Irish especially, but also in
all other tongues. Mike conned over the
figures, and Tim the rhymes. The rule of
three charmed instead of puzzling the one,
while the other cultivated polite letters.
Tim. and Mike became greatly renowned in
consequence, although the priest—but it was
said to be all jealousy—declared them a pair
of as fine bog-trotters as was ever spiled by
laming. Neither of them at first took kindly
to the spade. Mike became manager to an
accountant, a dabbler in other people's business
rather than in any, at least in any
agricultural, business of his own; and Tim
set up a school. Of course a school would not
keep the one, any more than his figures would
keep the other. Both had their friends, used
them as they could, and got on as best they
might. Tim, in the matter of the school, was
accused of having a proud and philanthropic
purpose rather than a mere money-making
one; and this calumny,which had a bit of truth
in it, was a real weight upon Tim's character.

That two such clever and mighty men
! could subsist in the same village was greatly
wondered at, and more than wondered at
when both of them fell a-coorting the beauty
of the village. They were sure to do this,
the priest said, and sure to lay up a store of
broken heads and bloody noses by so doing.

It was a great trial for Nelly, and indeed
the same trial befell all the people of
Kiltubby, for it was necessary for one and all to
make choice between the friendship of Tim
and the friendship of Mike.  To be well with
both was impossible. Each had his mode
of courting. Mike built a stone house in
place of his mud one, transferring the old
mud walls to the convenience of a cow. And
how could Nelly resist so substantial, and yet
so respectful and delicate an appeal to her
good sense as well as her good feeling ? Tim's
mode of parrying such an attack was what
the French would call leger. He snipped a
bit of ribbon from Nelly's cap, and stuck it
in his own caubeen, at the next fair;
brandishing an oak stick, and declaring aloud, at
the same time, that he was ready to fight
whomsoever would question the superiority
of the ankle of the owner of that ribbon,
to any other ankle in the Goolden Vale.
If Nelly's heart were touched by the
successful and manly hullabaloo, how could it
resist a string of verses, which were quite
interminable, to her honour and glory? Nelly
| looked coldly on the stone house. " Mud 's
warmer ! " cried Tim. Nelly thought so;
she married Tim, and preferred his mud
palace to his rival's stone one.

Mike swore that he would take terrible
vengeance, and he was a man to keep his
word. He could wait for it; and he thought
the first best means of compassing it was