were all congregated under the same roof, to the amount of from a
hundred to a hundred and fifty, or two hundred. In this school I
remained for about a year or two, when our family removed to a place
called Nurchasy, the property of the Rev. Dr. Story, of Corick. Of
us, however, he neither could nor did know anything, for we were
under-tenants, our immediate landlord being no less a person than Hugh
Traynor, then so famous for the distillation, sub rosa, of exquisite
mountain dew, and to whom the reader will find allusions made in that
capacity more than once in the following volume. Nurchasy was within
about half a mile of Findramore, to which school, under O'Beirne, I was
again sent. Here I continued, until a classical teacher came to a place
called Tulnavert, now the property of John Birney, Esq., of Lisburn,
to whom I had the pleasure of dedicating the two first volumes of my
"Traits and Stories." This tyrannical blockhead, whose name I do not
choose to mention, instead of being allowed to teach classics, ought to
have been put into a strait-waistcoat or the stocks, and either whipped
once in every twenty-four hours, or kept in a madhouse until the day of
his death. He had been a student in Maynooth, where he became deranged,
and was, of course, sent home to his friends, with whom he recovered
sufficiently to become cruel and hypocritical, to an extent which I have
never yet seen equalled. Whenever the son of a rich man committed an
offence, he would grind his teeth and growl like a tiger, but in no
single instance had he the moral courage or sense of justice to correct
him. On the contrary, he uniformly "nursed his wrath to keep it warm,"
until the son of a poor man transgressed, and on his unfortunate body
he was sure to wreak signal vengeance for the stupidity or misconduct of
the wealthy blockhead. This was his system, and my readers may form some
opinion of the low ebb at which knowledge and moral feeling were at the
time, when I assure them, that not one of the humbler boys durst make a
complaint against the scoundrel at home, unless under the certainty of