Jack, our driver, was a bugler in the Wicklow
Rifle Militia, and he was now driving
bare-headed and in an easy undress, consisting
of a dirty, ragged, red militia jacket, much
the worse for stable practice. In his military
capacity, Jack was pugnacious and talkative,
brusque and abrupt, but in his civil and Augean
province, silent, stolid, quiet and social.

Our new passenger, Mr. Saul, the doctor,
was a wiry young man of some five-and-
twenty shooting-seasons, fonder of salmon-
fishing than farriery, and of giving himself
whisky than of giving invalid horses drenches.
He wore a soiled green shooting-jacket, a
loose, untidy velvet waistcoat, and a red rope of
a handkerchief strangled round his neck, giving
him at first sight the appearance of having
unsuccessfully attempted suicide. As for his face,
it was thin, pale, and I must confess rather
debauched-looking; his eyes were wild, excitable,
and bloodshot; his cheek hollow and hectic;
his mouth wide, wavering, and witty. He was
always mercurially shifting his seat: now he was
on this side, now on that; now driving, now
leaping out to walk; now singing, now
shouting.

"Jack's a soldier; you should hear him on
the bugle; bedad he's powerful," said Mr. Saul,
patronisingly looking at Jack.

"Get out of that, doctor," said Jack,
colouring.

"A purty regiment it is, too," said Saul,
becoming ironical suddenly. "Divil a one of
'em could hit a tree at twenty paces. They
might rifle the inimy —bedad if they'd shoot
'em!"

"You ought to know, Mr. Saul," says Jack,
reprovingly and hurt, "how many feet off we
were when you saw us firing with the rifle at
the butt—was it twinty?"

"None of your brag, Jack," said Saul, laughing
him down, " or I shall have to thrash it out
of ye. Why don't you learn to box, Jack? The
fist never misses fire."

"Last time as ever I went to Dublin, didn't
I box a porter and two carmen before I got to
the end of the first street, little as I am, say
now, Mr. Saul?" said Jack.

"Weren't you rejected twice as a soldier?
What did the old sergeant at Rathdrum say of
you?" said Mr. Saul: " 'I wish the Rifles luck
of ye!'"

"Oh, this sergeant's nothing!" said Jack,
"or why does he take to black clothes?"

"Bedad," said Saul, "get out of that. He's
a brave man, Jack; and I'll knock down any
one who says he isn't. You know as well as I,
Jack, that the sergeant was of the Seventy-
eighth formerly, who they stripped the colours
of because they would beat to mass against
government orders.

Here we came to a shibbeen, and for the
third time the young doctor got down and called
for whisky. Mr. Saul was not a teetotaller, no
more was Jack. We all got down.

"I hope you won't care, Mr. Saul, but here's
some of the crathur we haven't had time to get
christened," said the widow landlady, evidently
knowing her customer.

"All right, widdy; bring two dandies," said
Saul, seizing a glass, " and some cordial. Faix!
an' this is rale Innishowen" (smacks his lips),
"divil a bit else to me! The beer's bad about
here—all" (learnedly, and with chemical authority)
"because of the sulphurous vapour, and
having no elixir of oxygin in the centhre of the
wather. Widdy, soda- wather! I had too much stuff
last night at the fair, and I'm still thirsty, though
I drank four jugs of cold pump-wather this morning,
besides two bottles of porther. Take a
dandy—there's no headache in Irish whisky.
Well, then, I'll take it to prove to you. By all
the Byrnes and O'Tooles in Wicklow—and that's
saying something this side the Scalp—you're the
best fellow I've seen for many a day!"

A scene more intensely Irish and more
intensely un-English could scarcely be conceived.
Here was a mail-cart reckless of delays; a
consequential, drunken, sporting farrier passing for
a real doctor, and a driver quite indifferent to
punctuality, parcels, passengers, or nightfall,
stopping at the bidding of a half-drunken cow-
doctor at a roadside whisky-shop. I saw it was
no use to lose my temper. There was nothing
to do but to observe the humours of Saul, the
cow-doctor, snipe-shooter, and salmon-
fisherman.

As for Saul, when he was not bragging of the
reputation he might have attained in medicine
but for his fondness for snipe-shooting, he was
tossing off burning thimblefuls of whisky,
rallying Jack about his regiment, courting
the landlady, singing snatches of songs, or
enlightening me on Irish customs.

Mr. Saul was just one of those reckless, idle
prodigals who, with much good-nature and many
social companions, become, when squireens with
a little money and a little land, the special
curses of this improvident country—just the man
who, in Ninety-eight, would have been beguiled
into a secret club, and have headed a clump of red
pikes at Vinegar Hill; who, later, would have
floated his friends in claret, ridden over his hall-
table on his spanking mare, or got up, on true
Lever principles, some wet day, a fox-hunt inside
the old house at Tubbermore. Impulsive,
quick blooded, he would be led about by cunning
priests, and die of delirium tremens before thirty.
At a fair dance, at a faction fight, at a race,
Saul was, I could see, the leader of the Wicklow
hot-bloods.

As for Jack, who sat there perfectly merry and
at his ease, with no trouble about his passengers,
parcels, or her Majesty's mails, with his whip-
lash serpenting about the hard trodden mud
floor, his dirty red jacket open, fluttering in the
draught, he was quite a type of the southern
Irishman, choleric, generous, thoughtless,
impulsive, with all the materials for a soldier or a
poet burning within him, a man who, now laughing
from ear to ear at Saul's songs and local
jokes, and telling stories of his Dublin fights,
with the widdy's child dancing on his knee,
might, under certain provocations, have been