thrown too much into situations of danger and temptation. I might mention some additional circumstances of criminal aggravation in this lady's case; but, as they would tend to point out the real person to those acquainted with her history, I shall forbear. She has since made a noise in the world, and has maintained, I believe, a tolerably fair reputation. Soon after sunrise the sunrise the next morning, a heavenly morning of June, we dropped our anchor in the famous Bay of Dublin. There was a dead calm; the sea was like a lake; and, as we were some miles from the Pigeon House, a boat was manned to put us on shore. The lovely lady, unaware that we were parties to her guilty secret, went with us, accompanied by her numerous attendants, and looking as beautiful, and hardly less innocent, than an angel. Long afterwards, Lord Westport and I met her, hanging upon the arm of her husband, a manly and good-natured man, of polished manners, to whom she introduced us; for she voluntarily challenged us as her fellow-voyagers, and, I suppose, had no suspicion which pointed in our direction. She even joined her husband in cordially pressing us to visit them at their magnificent chateau. Upon us, meantime, whatever might be her levity, the secret of which accident had put us in possession pressed with a weight of awe; we shuddered at our own discovery; and we both agreed to drop no hint of it in any direction.*

* Lord Westport's age at that time was the same as my own; that is, we both wanted a few months of being fifteen. But I had the advantage, perhaps, in thoughtfulness and observation of life. Being thoroughly free, however, from opinionativeness, Lord Westport readily came over to any views of mine for which I could show sufficient grounds. And on this occasion I found no difficulty in convincing him that honor and fidelity did not form sufficient guaranties

Landing about three miles from Dublin, (according to my present remembrance at Dunleary,) we were not long in reaching Sackville Street.

for the custody of secrets. Presence of mind so as to revive one's obligations in time, tenacity of recollection, and vigilance over one's own momentary slips of tongue, so as to keep watch over indirect disclosures, are also requisite. And at that time I had an instance within my own remembrance where a secret had been betrayed, by a person of undoubted honor, but most inadvertently betrayed, and in pure oblivion of his engagement to silence. Indeed, unless where the secret is of a nature to affect some person's life, I do not believe that most people would remember beyond a period of two years the most solemn obligations to secrecy. After a lapse of time, varying of course with the person, the substance of the secret will remain upon the mind; but how he came by the secret, or under what circumstances, he will very probably have forgotten. It is unsafe to rely upon the most religious or sacramental obligation to secrecy, unless, together with the secret, you could transfer also a magic ring that should, by a growing pressure or puncture, sting a man into timely alarm and warning.

CHAPTER VIII.

DUBLIN.

IN Sackville Street stood the town house of Lord Altamont; and here, in the breakfast room, we found the earl seated. Long and intimately as I had known Lord Westport, it so happened that I had never seen his father, who had, indeed, of late almost pledged himself to a continued residence in Ireland by his own patriotic earnestness as an agricultural improver; whilst for his son, under the difficulties and delays at that time of all travelling, any residence whatever in England seemed preferable, but especially a residence with his mother amongst the relatives of his distinguished English grandfather, and in such close neighborhood to Eton. Lord Altamont once told me, that the journey outward and inward between Eton and Westport, taking into account all the unavoidable deviations from the direct route, in compliance with the claims of kinship, &c., (a case which in Ireland forced a traveller often into a perpetual zigzag,) counted up to something more than a thousand miles. That is, in effect, when valued in loss of time, and allowance being made for the want of continuity in those parts of the travelling system that did not accurately dovetail into each other, not less than one entire fortnight must be arnually sunk upon a

labor that yielded no commensurate fruit. Hence the long three-years' interval which had separated father and son; and hence my own nervous apprehension, as we were racing through the suburbs of Dublin, that I should unavoidably lay a freezing restraint upon that reunion to which, after such a separation, both father and son must have looked forward with anticipation so anxious. Such cases of unintentional intrusion are at times inevitable; but, even to the least sensitive, they are always distressing; most of all they are so to the intruder, who in fact feels himself in the odd position of a criminal without a crime. He is in the situation of one who might have happened to be chased by a Bengal tiger (or, say that the tiger were a sheriff's officer) into the very centre of the Eleusinian mysteries. Do not tease me, my reader, by alleging that there were no sheriffs' officers at Athens or Eleusis. Not many, I admit; but perhaps quite as many as there were of Bengal tigers. In such a case, under whatever compulsion, the man has violated a holy seclusion. He has seen that which he ought not to have seen; and he is viewed with horror by the privileged spectators. Should he plead that this was his misfortune, and not his fault, the answer would be, "True; it was your misfortune; we know it; and it is our misfortune to be under the necessity of hating you for it." But there was no cause for similar fears at present; so uniformly considerate in his kindness was Lord Altamont. It is true, that Lord Westport, as an only child, and a child to be proud of, for he was at that time rather handsome, and conciliated general good will by his engaging manners, was viewed by his father with an anxiety of love that sometimes became almost painful to witness. But this natural self-surrender to a first involuntary emotion Lord Altamont did not suffer to usurp any such lengthened expression as might too pain

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fully have reminded me of being one too many." One solitary half minute being paid down as a tribute to the sanctities of the case, his next care was to withdraw me, the stranger, from any oppressive feeling of strangership. And accordingly, so far from realizing the sense of being an intruder, in one minute under his courteous welcome I had come to feel that, as the companion of his one darling upon earth, me also he comprehended within hist paternal regards.

It must have been nine o'clock precisely when we entered the breakfast room. So much I know by an a priori argument, and could wish, therefore, that it had been scientifically important to know it - as important, for instance, as to know the occultation of a star, or the transit of Venus to a second. For the urn was at that moment placed on the table; and though Ireland, as a whole, is privileged to be irregular, yet such was our Sackville Street regularity, that not so much nine o'clock announced this periodic event, as inversely this event announced nine o'clock. And I used to affirm, however shocking it might sound to poor threadbare metaphysicians incapable of transcendental truths, that not nine o'clock was the cause of revealing the breakfast urn, but, on the contrary, that the revelation of the breakfast urn was the true and secret cause of nine o'clock a phenomenon which otherwise no candid reader will pretend that he can satisfactorily account for, often as he has known it to come round. The arn was already throwing up its column of fuming mist; and the breakfast table was covered with June flowers sent by a lady on the chance of Lord Westport's arrival. It was clear, therefore, that we were expected; but so we had been for three or four days previously; and it illustrates the enormous uncertainties of travelling at this closing era of the eighteenth century, that for three or