upon the table, and they the last my master had!  Says Sir Condy to me, ’Your hand is steadier than mine to-night, old Thady, and that’s a wonder; fill you the horn for me.’  And so, wishing his honour success, I did; but I filled it, little thinking of what would befall him.  He swallows it down, and drops like one shot.  We lifts him up, and he was speechless, and quite black in the face.  We put him to bed, and in a short time he wakened, raving with a fever on his brain.  He was shocking either to see or hear.

’Judy!  Judy! have you no touch of feeling?  Won’t you stay to help us nurse him?’ says I to her, and she putting on her shawl to go out of the house.

‘I’m frightened to see him,’ says she, ’and wouldn’t nor couldn’t stay in it; and what use?  He can’t last till the morning.’  With that she ran off.  There was none but my shister and myself left near him of all the many friends he had.

The fever came and went, and came and went, and lasted five days, and the sixth he was sensible for a few minutes, and said to me, knowing me very well, ‘I’m in a burning pain all withinside of me, Thady.’  I could not speak, but my shister asked him would he have this thing or t’other to do him good?  ‘No,’ says he, ‘nothing will do me good no more,’ and he gave a terrible screech with the torture he was in; then again a minute’s ease—­’brought to this by drink,’ says he.  ’Where are all the friends?—­where’s Judy?  Gone, hey?  Ay, Sir Condy has been a fool all his days,’ said he; and there was the last word he spoke, and died.  He had but a very poor funeral after all.

If you want to know any more, I’m not very well able to tell you; but my Lady Rackrent did not die, as was expected of her, but was only disfigured in the face ever after by the fall and bruises she got; and she and Jason, immediately after my poor master’s death, set about going to law about that jointure; the memorandum not being on stamped paper, some say it is worth nothing, others again it may do; others say Jason won’t have the lands at any rate; many wishes it so.  For my part, I’m tired wishing for anything in this world, after all I’ve seen in it; but I’ll say nothing—­it would be a folly to be getting myself ill-will in my old age.  Jason did not marry, nor think of marrying Judy, as I prophesied, and I am not sorry for it:  who is?  As for all I have here set down from memory and hearsay of the family, there’s nothing but truth in it from beginning to end.  That you may depend upon, for where’s the use of telling lies about the things which everybody knows as well as I do?

The Editor could have readily made the catastrophe of Sir Condy’s history more dramatic and more pathetic, if he thought it allowable to varnish the plain round tale of faithful Thady.  He lays it before the English reader as a specimen of manners and characters which are perhaps unknown in England.  Indeed, the domestic habits of no nation in Europe were less known to the English than those of their sister country, till within these few years.