bread."

"There cannot be a more honourable duty, surely," Pen said.

"Honourable! Bedad, sir, I'd like to see the man who said Jack Costigan
would consent to anything dishonourable. I have a heart, sir, though I am
poor; I like a man who has a heart. You have: I read it in your honest
face and steady eye. And would you believe it"? he added, after a pause,
and with a pathetic whisper, "that that Bingley who has made his fortune
by me child, gives her but two guineas a week: out of which she finds
herself in dresses, and which, added to me own small means, makes our
all?"

Now the Captain's means were so small as to be, it may be said, quite
invisible. But nobody knows how the wind is tempered to shorn Irish
lambs, and in what marvellous places they find pasture. If Captain
Costigan, whom I had the honour to know, would but have told his history,
it would have been a great moral story. But he neither would have told it
if he could, nor could if he would; for the Captain was not only
unaccustomed to tell the truth,--he was unable even to think it--and fact
and fiction reeled together in his muzzy, whiskified brain.

He began life rather brilliantly with a pair of colours, a fine person
and legs, and one of the most beautiful voices in the world. To his
latest day he sang with admirable pathos and humour those wonderful Irish
ballads which are so mirthful and so melancholy: and was always the first
himself to cry at their pathos. Poor Cos! he was at once brave and
maudlin, humorous and an idiot; always good-natured, and sometimes almost
trustworthy. Up to the last day of his life he would drink with any man,
and back any man's bill: and his end was in a spunging-house, where the