and estates on the death of the old Earl) to say that he was ashamed of
the life that he had led, and eager to make amendment by accepting any
honest employment that could be offered to him. The traveller who had
saved his life, and whose opinion was to be trusted, declared that the
letter represented a sincerely penitent state of mind. There were good
qualities in the vagabond, which only wanted a little merciful
encouragement to assert themselves. The reply that he received from
England came from the lawyers employed by the new Earl. They had
arranged with their agents in New York to pay to the younger brother a
legacy of a thousand pounds, which represented all that had been left
to him by his father's will. If he wrote again his letters would not be
answered; his brother had done with him. Treated in this inhuman
manner, the wild lord became once more worthy of his name. He tried a
new life as a betting man at races and trotting-matches. Fortune
favoured him at the outset, and he considerably increased his legacy.
With the customary infatuation of men who gain money by risking the
loss of it, he presumed on his good luck. One pecuniary disaster
followed another, and left him literally penniless. He was found again,
in England, exhibiting an open boat in which he and a companion had
made one of those foolhardy voyages across the Atlantic, which have now
happily ceased to interest the public. To a friend who remonstrated
with him, he answered that he reckoned on being lost at sea, and on so
committing a suicide worthy of the desperate life that he had led. The
last accounts of him, after this, were too vague and too contradictory
to be depended on. At one time it was reported that he had returned to
the United States. Not long afterwards unaccountable paragraphs
appeared in newspapers declaring, at one and the same time, that he was
living among bad company in Paris, and that he was hiding disreputably
in an ill famed quarter of the city of Dublin, called "the Liberties."
In any case there was good reason to fear that Irish-American