“Certainly, uncle; they were called by every one, ‘The Wife Catchers.’”

“Well, Jack, many a title has been given more undeservedly—­many a rich heiress they were the means of bringing into our family.  But they are no more, Jack.  I lost the venerated relics just one week after your poor dear aunt departed this life.”

My uncle drew out his bandanna handkerchief and applied it to his eyes; but I cannot be positive to which of the family relics this tribute of affectionate recollection was paid.

“Peace be with their soles!” said I, solemnly.  “By what fatal chance did our old friends slip off the peg?”

“Alas!” replied my uncle, “it was a melancholy accident; and as I perceive you take an interest in their fate, I will relate it to you.  But first fill your glass, Jack; you need not be afraid of this stuff; it never saw the face of a gauger.  Come, no skylights; ’tis as mild as new milk; there’s not a head-ache in a hogshead of it.”

To encourage me by his example, my uncle grasped the huge black case-bottle which stood before him, and began to manufacture a tumbler of punch according to Father Tom’s popular receipt.

Whilst he is engaged in this pleasing task, I will give my readers a pen-and-ink sketch of my respected relative.  Fancy a man declining from his fiftieth year, but fresh, vigorous, and with a greenness in his age that might put to the blush some of our modern hotbed-reared youths, with the best of whom he could cross a country on the back of his favourite hunter, Cruiskeen, and when the day’s sport was over, could put a score of them under the aforementioned oak table—­which, by the way, was frequently the only one of the company that kept its legs upon these occasions of Hibernian hospitality.  I think I behold him now, with his open, benevolent brow, thinly covered with grey hair, his full blue eye and florid cheek, which glowed like the sunny side of a golden-pippin that the winter’s frost had ripened without shrivelling.  But as he has finished the admixture of his punch, I will leave him to speak for himself.

“You know, Jack,” said he, after gulping down nearly half the newly-mixed tumbler, by way of sample, “you know that our family can lay no claim to antiquity; in fact, our pedigree ascends no higher, according to the most authentic records, than Shawn Duffy, my grandfather, who rented a small patch of ground on the sea-coast, which was such a barren, unprofitable spot, that it was then, and is to this day, called ‘The Devil’s Half-acre.’  And well it merited the name, for if poor Shawn was to break his heart at it, he never could get a better crop than thistles or ragweed off it.  But though the curse of sterility seemed to have fallen on the land, Fortune, in order to recompense Shawn for Nature’s niggardliness, made the caverns and creeks of that portion of the coast which bounded his farm towards the sea the favourite resort of smugglers.  Shawn, in the true spirit of Christian benevolence, was reputed to have favoured those enterprising traders in their industry, by assisting to convey their cargoes into the interior of the country.  It was on one of those expeditions, about five o’clock on a summer’s morning, that a gauger unluckily met my grandfather carrying a bale of tobacco on his back.”