early days was produced successfully by Macready after
Griffin's death. His fame, however, depends on his pictures of
Irish life, and they are concentrated best in the literary
accessories of the present melodrama.


_I.--A Secret Wife_


At a pleasure garden on a hill near Limerick, Eily O'Connor, the
beautiful daughter of Mihil O'Connor, the rope-maker, first met Hardress
Cregan, a young gentleman fresh from college; and on the same night, as
she and her father were returning homeward, they were attacked by a
rabble of men and boys, and rescued by the stranger and his hunchbacked
companion, Danny Mann. A few days afterwards Danny Mann visited the
rope-walk, and had a long conversation with Eily, and from that time the
girl's character seemed to have undergone a change. Her recreations and
her attire became gayer; but her cheerfulness of mind was gone. Her
lover, Myles Murphy, a good-natured farmer from Killarney, gained over
her father to his interests, and the old man pressed her either to give
consent to the match or a good reason for her refusal. After a
distressing altercation, Eily left the house without a word of farewell.

She had married Hardress Cregan secretly, and the priest had died
immediately after the ceremony. The first time she was seen, but not
recognised, in her boyish husband's company was by the Dalys, to which
family his fellow-collegian and intimate friend, Kyrle Daly, belonged. A
boat passed along the river before their house containing a hooded girl,
the hunchback, and Hardress Cregan himself. After they had disappeared,
Kyrle Daly rode to pay court to Anne Chute, Hardress's cousin, and, to