With respect to the Bodagh and his son, the anxiety which we have described them as feeling in consequence of the latter’s interview with O’Donovan, was now completely removed.  Una’s mother had nearly forgotten both the crime and its consequences; but upon the spirit of her daughter there appeared to rest a silent and settled sorrow not likely to be diminished or removed.  Her cheerfulness had abandoned her, and many an hour did she contrive to spend with Biddy Nulty, eager in the mournful satisfaction of talking over all that affection prompted of her banished lover.

We must now beg our readers to accompany us to a scene of a different description from any we have yet drawn.  The night of a November day had set in, or rather had advanced so far as nine o’clock, and towards the angle of a small three-cornered field, called by a peculiar coincidence of name, Oona’s Handkerchief, in consequence of an old legend connected with it, might be seen moving a number of straggling figures, sometimes in groups of fours and fives; sometimes in twos or threes as the case might be, and not unfrequently did a single straggler advance, and, after a few private words, either join the others or proceed alone to a house situated in the angular corner of the field to which we allude.  As the district was a remote one, and the night rather dark, several shots might be heard as they proceeded, and several flashes in the pan seen from the rusty arms of those who were probably anxious to pull a trigger for the first time.  The country, at the period we write of, be it observed, was in a comparative state of tranquility, and no such thing as a police corps had been heard of or known in the neighborhood.

At the lower end of a long, level kind of moor called the Black Park, two figures approached a* kind of gate or pass that opened into it.  One of them stood until the other advanced, and, in a significant tone, asked who comes there?

“A friend to the guard,” was the reply.

“Good morrow,” said the other.

“Good morrow mornin’ to you.”

“What age are you in?”

“In the end of the Fifth.”

“All right; come on, boy; the true blood’s in you, whoever you are.”

“An’ is it possible you don’t know me, Dandy?”

“Faix, it is; I forgot my spectacles tonight.  Who the dickins are you at all?”

“I suppose you purtind to forget Ned M’Cormick?”

“Is it Nogher’s son?”

“The divil a other; an’, Dandy Duffy, how are you, man alive?”

“Why, you see, Ned, I’ve been so long out of the counthry, an’ I’m now so short a time back, that, upon my sowl, I forget a great many of my ould acquaintances, especially them that wor only slips when I wint acrass.  Faith, I’m purty well considherin, Ned, I thank you.”

“Bad luck to them that sint you acrass, Dandy; not but that you got off purty well on the whole, by all accounts.  They say only that Rousin Redhead swore like a man you’d ‘a’ got a touch of the Shaggy Shoe.”