"Punshill!" says she, showing all her yellow
teeth, and flinging up her hands with a laugh as
she drove on—" punshill is it? What, Jack
MacGan punshill! Away wid ye!"

"Did ye ever hear the likes of him?" said a
woman, passing with a square of brown cat's-
meat on a skewer.

Some thought me cracked, others foolish, but
the majority shrugged their shoulders and said,
"Can't ye see, Biddy, he's an Englishman, the
cratur!"

Then a horrid crowd of armless, eyeless objects
surrounded me, baring their stumps and thrusting
out their snuffy, lean hands. One said " he
had a family of ten orfins to maintain, your
honour;" another, turning up his pulpy,
opaque eyes, said, " I've been dark these twenty
years, your honour." It might have been so,
but the dirty rascal looked scarcely nineteen,
which rendered the optical delusion a difficult
feat.

At last, innocently, shambling, calm, and
resigned, came Jack with the rickety car, which he
proceeded to build up with parcels. Touching his
brimless hat to me with an air of consequence,
business, and authority, he drove off the beggars,
as a village cur would have chased away a flock
of geese. The man was one of those wild-eyed,
reckless-looking fellows you seldom see among
the dull-blooded Saxons. He caught up the
reins, more like Phaeton out for a mad day, than
one of those steady English coachmen who sit
as if they had grown to the box, and are
immovable till some operation had been performed
with a head-stall or splinter-bar.

At last we got under way, Jack running into
the spirit shop, to exchange half a dozen jokes,
and to toss off a glass of some shining
quicksilver, which I suppose was whisky, for he went
in laughing and came out singing. We drove
off from that squalid side street on our side
seat, with our feet on that swinging leather shelf
which is at first so fickle, unstable, and unpleasant.
We bumped against a post, which rather
tickled Jack, tied up the harness, which
subsequently gave way with a snap, and got into the
more fashionable streets, where, by dint of
pounding along in defiance of everything, a
screech on a battered horn, and a crack of Jack's
whip, we produced rather a sensation among
the fashionable loungers and graceful loungers
of Grafton-street.

Once between the whitewashed villa walls,
and climbing the hard blue road of the suburb,
Jack was happy and talkative. Now he gave
each of his parcels (including her Majesty's
mail-bag) an adjusting kick—leaped out and
pulled his horse's buckles tighter, tied a fresh
knot in his short whip, caught up the lash in a
knowing way, after flipping a fly off his horse's
left ear; then shuffled his coat easier, and rubbed
his brimless hat round with a twirl of his elbow.
Jack was anything but an hypochondriac; in fact,
his spirits, in comparison with those of any
ordinary Englishman, were the spirits of inebriation.

But Jack had not "a hair turned" with the
whisky. We soon began to pick up passengers,
but from Jack's uneasy and sideward eye, I could
see he still waited for some special addition to
his load. Could it be some colleen bawn (fair-
haired girl) he expected? or was it some police
sergeant, tithe proctor, or notice server whom
he dreaded to meet?

"Sir to you," said Jack, suddenly snapping
round on me, ceasing to mechanically flog his
horse, " it's the Doctor I'm waiting for; we were
to take him up at the Knockmadown four cross-
roads, and we are within a ha'porth of them now.
It's perhaps one of the pleasantest gentlemen you
ever spoke to, the best shot and rider and fly fisher
in all Wicklow, so quick with the tongue, and
always his reply as pat——Och! here he comes:
and it's pretending I don't know him I'll be. Saints
above us, how he's running!" And Jack slapped
his thigh to express supreme delight, looking
away from the coming man, and driving slowly
on.

However, to Jack's great vexation, the runner
turned out to be only Mr. Plunkett's man,
with a parcel for Rathdrum. "I wouldn't
miss Mr. Saul for forty pounds," said Jack,
pulling up at the cross-roads; "it does me good,
like medicine, seeing him; besides, I want to see
him about Crazy Jane——"

"Some poor insane relation," I thought.

"—for she can't take her grass."

"A vegetarian," I said to myself.

"Millia murder!" which means ten thousand
murders in English, cried a passenger, " will the
Docthor never come?" We were waiting at
the cross-road for the take up.

"Here he comes!" cried a bagsman, who was
stamping at the delay, "looking like a ha'porth of
soap after a long day's washing."

"Och! the mummy of a monkey. Look at
him!" cried a third passenger—"look how he
pulls his legs after him, as if they were only
borrowed for the day!"

"If you don't make haste, sir, we can't be
waiting," said Jack; and Mr. Saul, with " Don't
you know me, Jack?" tumbled up. "Cross about
us! Don't you know me, Jack, ma bouchal?
Give us a light. Haven't I been running like a
madman to Bedlam to catch the bit of blood
there you're driving three miles an hour to the
knacker's! Give me the whip!" He was at
home with all of us in a moment.

"Och! is it you, Mr. Saul? And how's somebody's
sweetheart, the black- eyed widdy's daughter
at Rathdrum, Doctor? When's the banns to
be up?" said Jack, with a bit of fine acting.

"Och! be asy, Mike, get out of that," said
Saul, colouring and flogging the horse.

"Who is this?" I said in a whisper to the
man next me; " he does not look like a
doctor?"

Said Jack, sotto voce, " A cow-doctor, your
honour, but we call him ' the Doctor,' out of
respect to his father, who is the great farrier in
Rathdrum; and sure hasn't he got the brass-
plate and the knocker, and the red and green
bottles and the pounder for the salts, and what
would a rale doctor want more? And a tidy bit
of land, too, foranent us."