young farmer, of the better class, from the County Mayo, where he held
three or four hundred wretchedly bad acres under Lord Ballindine, and
one or two other small farms, under different landlords. He was a
good-looking young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, with that
mixture of cunning and frankness in his bright eye, which is so common
among those of his class in Ireland, but more especially so in
Connaught.

The mother of these two young men kept an inn in the small town of
Dunmore, and though from the appearance of the place, one would be
led to suppose that there could not be in Dunmore much of that kind
of traffic which innkeepers love, Mrs Kelly was accounted a warm,
comfortable woman. Her husband had left her for a better world some
ten years since, with six children; and the widow, instead of making
continual use, as her chief support, of that common wail of being a
poor, lone woman, had put her shoulders to the wheel, and had earned
comfortably, by sheer industry, that which so many of her class, when
similarly situated, are willing to owe to compassion.

She held on the farm, which her husband rented from Lord Ballindine,
till her eldest son was able to take it. He, however, was now a
gauger [8] in the north of Ireland. Her second son was the attorney's
clerk; and the farm had descended to Martin, the younger, whom we have
left jostling and jostled at one of the great doors of the Four Courts,
and whom we must still leave there for a short time, while a few more
of the circumstances of his family are narrated.

[FOOTNOTE 8: gauger--a British revenue officer often engaged in
the collection of duties on distilled spirits.]