was a certainty of his having a numerous and well-attended school in a
neighborhood with whose inhabitants he was acquainted.

Honest, kind-hearted Paddy!--pity that you should ever feel distress or
hunger--pity that you should be compelled to seek, in another land, the
hard-earned pittance by which you keep the humble cabin over your chaste
wife and naked children! Alas! what noble materials for composing a
national character, of which humanity might be justly proud, do the
lower orders of the Irish possess, if raised and cultivated by an
enlightened education! Pardon me, gentle reader, for this momentary
ebullition; I grant I am a little dark now. I assure you, however, the
tear of enthusiastic admiration is warm on my eye-lids, when I remember
the flitches of bacon, the sacks of potatoes, the bags of meal, the
miscowns of butter, and the dishes of eggs--not omitting crate after
crate of turf which came in such rapid succession to Mat Kavanagh,
during the first week on which he opened his school. Ay, and many a
bottle of stout poteen, when

"The eye of the gauger saw it not,"

was, with a sly, good-humored wink, handed over to Mat, or Nancy, no
matter which, from under the comfortable drab jock, with velvet-covered
collar, erect about the honest, ruddy face of a warm, smiling farmer,
or even the tattered frieze of a poor laborer--anxious to secure
the attention of the "masther" to his little "Shoneen," whom, in the
extravagance of his ambition, he destined to "wear the robes as a
clargy." Let no man say, I repeat, that the Irish are not fond of
education.

In the course of a month Mat's school was full to the door posts, for,