'The scoundrel,' exclaimed O'Grady, stamping up and down the room.

At this moment a tremendous crash was heard; the ladies jumped from their seats; O'Grady paused in his rage, and his poor pale wife exclaimed, "Tis in the conservatory.'

A universal rush was now made to the spot, and there was Handy Andy buried in the ruins of flower-pots and exotics, directly under an enormous breach in the glass roof of the building. How this occurred a few words will explain. Andy, when he went to sleep in the justice-room, slept soundly for some hours, but awoke in the horrors of a dream, in which he fancied he was about to be hanged. So impressed was he by the vision, that he determined on making his escape if he could, and to this end piled the chair upon the desk, and the volumes of law-books on the chair; and, being an active fellow, contrived to scramble up high enough to lay his hand on the frame of the skylight, and thus make his way out on the roof. Then walking, as well as the darkness would permit him, along the coping of the wall, he approached, as it chanced, the conservatory, but the coping being loose, one of the flags turned under Andy's foot, and bang he went through the glass roof, carrying down in his fall some score of flower-pots, and finally stuck in a tub, with his legs upwards, and embowered in the branches of crushed geraniums and hydrangeas.

He was dragged out of the tub, amidst a shower of curses from O'Grady; but the moment Andy recovered the few senses he had, and saw Furlong, regardless of the anathemas of the Squire, he shouted out, 'There he is!—there he is!' and, rushing towards him, exclaimed, 'Now, did I dhrowned you, sir,-did I? Sure, I never murdhered you!'

'Twas as much as could be done to keep O'Grady's hands off Andy, for smashing the conservatory, when Furlong's presence made him no longer liable to imprisonment.

'Maybe he has a vote?' said Furlong, anxious to display how much he was on the qui vive in election matters.

'Have you a vote, you rascal?' said O'Grady.

'You may sarche me, if you like, your honour,' said Andy, who thought a vote was some sort of property he was suspected of stealing.

'You are either the biggest rogue, or the biggest fool, I ever met,' said O'Grady. 'Which are you now?'

'Whichever your honour plazes,' said Andy.

'If I forgive you, will you stand by me at the election?' 'I'll stand anywhere your honour bids me,' said Andy humbly.

'That's a thoroughgoing rogue, I'm inclined to think,' said O'Grady aside, to Furlong.

'He looks more like a fool, in my appwehension,' was the reply.

'Oh, these fellows conceal the deepest roguery sometimes under an assumed simplicity. You don't understand the

Irish.'

'Unde'stand!' exclaimed Furlong; whole countwy quite incompwehensible !'

'I pwonounce the

'Well!' growled O'Grady to Andy, after a moment's consideration, 'go down to the kitchen, you housebreaking vagabond, and get your supper!'

Now, considering the 'fee, faw, fum,' qualities of O'Grady, the reader may be surprised at the easy manner in which Andy slipped through his fingers, after having slipped through the roof of his conservatory; but as between two stools folks fall to the ground, so between two rages people sometimes tumble into safety. O'Grady was in a divided passion-first, his wrath was excited against Furlong for his blunder, and just as that was about to explode, the crash of Andy's sudden appearance amidst the flower-pots (like a practical parody on 'Love among the roses') called off the gathering storm in a new direction, and the fury sufficient to annihilate one was, by dispersion, harmless to two. But on the return of the party from the conservatory, after Andy's descent to the kitchen, O'Grady's rage against Furlong, though moderated, had settled down into a very substantial dissatisfaction, which he evinced by poking his nose between his forefinger and thumb, as if he meditated the abstraction of that salient feature from his face, shuffling his feet about, throwing his right leg over his left knee, and then suddenly, as if that were a mistake, throwing his left over the right, thrumming on the arm of his chair with his clenched hand, inhaling the air very audibly through his protruded lips, as if he were supping hot soup, and all the time fixing his eyes on the fire with a portentous gaze, as if he would have evoked from it a salamander.

Mrs. O'Grady, in such a state of affairs, wishing to speak to the stranger, yet anxious she should say nothing that could bear upon immediate circumstances, lest she might rouse her awful lord and master, racked her invention for what she should say; and at last, with ‘bated breath' and a very wornout smile, faltered forth

'Pray, Mr. Furlong, are you fond of shuttlecock?'

Furlong stared, and began a reply of Weally, I can't say

that

When O'Grady gruffly broke in with 'You'd better ask him, does he love teetotum.'

'I thought you could recommend me the best establishment in the metropolis, Mr. Furlong, for buying shuttlecocks,' continued the lady, unmindful of the interruption.

"You had better ask him where you could get mouse-traps,' growled O'Grady.

Mrs. O'Grady was silent, and O'Grady, whose rage had now assumed its absurd form of tagging changes, continued, increasing his growl, like a crescendo on the double-bass, as he proceeded: 'You'd better ask, I think-mouse-traps— steel-traps-clap-traps-rat-traps-rattle-traps-rattle-snakes!' Furlong stared,-Mrs. O'Grady was silent, and the Misses O'Grady cast fearful sidelong glances at 'Pa,' whose strange iteration always bespoke his not being in what good people call a 'sweet state of mind'; he laid hold of a teaspoon, and began beating a tattoo on the mantelpiece, to a low smothered whistle of some very obscure tune, which was suddenly stopped to say to Furlong, very abruptly,

'So, Egan diddled you?'

'Why, he certainly, as I conceive, pwactised, or I might say, in short-he-a-in fact

'Oh yes,' said O'Grady, cutting short Furlong's humming and hawing; 'oh yes, I know,—diddled you.'

Bang went the spoon again, keeping time with another string of nonsense,-' Diddled you-diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon,-who was there?'

'A Mister Dawson.'

'Phew! ejaculated O'Grady, with a doleful whistle; 'Dick the Divil! You were in nice hands! All up with us,-up with us,

-

Up, up, up,

And here we go down, down, down, Derry down!

Oh, murther!' and the spoon went faster than before. 'Any one else?'

'Mister Bermingham.'

'Bermingham!' exclaimed O'Grady.

'A clergyman, I think,' drawled Furlong. 'Bermingham!' reiterated O'Grady.

'What business has

he there, and be ——!' O'Grady swallowed a curse when he remembered he was a clergyman. 'The enemy's camp-not his principles! Oh, Bermingham, Bermingham-Brimmagem, Brummagem, Sheffield, Wolverhampton-Murther! Any one else? Was Durfy there?'

'No,' said Furlong; 'but there was an odd pe'son, whose name wymes to his as you seem fond of wymes, Mister O'Gwady.'

'What!' said O'Grady, quickly, and fixing his eye on Furlong; 'Murphy?'

'Yes. Miste' Muffy.'

O'Grady gave a more doleful whistle than before, and, banging the spoon faster than ever, exclaimed again, Murphy! -then I'll tell you what it is; do you see that?' And he held up the spoon before Furlong, who, being asked the same question several times, confessed he did see the spoon. 'Then I'll tell you what it is,' said O'Grady again; 'I wouldn't give you that for the election'; and with a disdainful jerk, he threw the spoon into the fire. After which he threw himself back in his chair, with an appearance of repose, while he glanced fiercely up at the ceiling and indulged in a very low whistle indeed. One of the girls stole softly round to the fire, and gently took up the tongs to recover the spoon: it made a slight rattle, and her father turned smartly round, and said, 'Can't you let the fire alone?—there's coal enough on it ;the devil burn 'em all,-Egan, Murphy, and all o' them! What do you stand there for, with the tongs in your hands, like a hairdresser or a stuck pig? I tell you I'm as hot as a lime-kiln; go out o' that!'

The daughter retired, and the spoon was left to its fate; the ladies did not dare to utter a word; O'Grady continued his gaze on the ceiling, and his whistle; and Furlong, very uncomfortable and much more astonished, after sitting in