not robbed or burned out to-day, they might be to-morrow; and under such circumstances to what purpose could they be expected to exercise industrious or laborious habits, when they knew that they might go to bed in comfort at night, and rise up beggars in the morning?  It is easy to see, then, that it was the lawless and turbulent state of the country that reduced them to such a mode of life, and drove them to make reprisals upon the property of others, in the absence of any safe or systematic way of living.  There is no doubt that a principle of revenge and retaliation animated their proceedings, and that they stood accountable for acts of great cruelty and murder, as well as of robbery.  The consequence necessarily was, that they felt themselves beyond the protection of all law, and fearfully distinct in the ferocity of their character from the more civilized population of the country, which waged an exterminating warfare against them under the sanction and by the assistance of whatever government existed.

It was about the year 1689 that they began to assume or to be characterized by a different designation—­we mean that of rapparees; so called, it is said, from the fact of their using the half pike or short rapier; although, for our part, we are inclined to think that they were so termed from the word rapio, to plunder, which strikes us as the most appropriate and obvious.  At all events it is enough to say that the tories were absorbed in the rapparees, and their name in Ireland and Great Britain, except as a political class, was forgotten and lost in that of the rapparees, who long survived them.

Barney Casey was, as the reader must have perceived, a young fellow of good sense and very acute observation.  He had been, since an early period of his youth, domesticated in the family of Mr. Lindsay, who respected him highly for his attachment and integrity.  He had a brother, however, who, with his many good qualities, was idle and headstrong.  His name was Michael, and, sooth to say, the wild charm of a freebooter’s life, in addition to his own indisposition to labor for his living, were more than the weak materials of his character could resist.  He consequently joined Shawn-na-Middogue and his gang, and preferred the dangerous and licentious life of a robber and plunderer to that of honesty and labor—­precisely as many men connected with a seafaring life prefer the habits of the smuggler or the pirate to those of the more honorable or legitimate profession.  Poor Barney exerted all his influence with his brother with a hope of rescuing him from the society and habits of hia dissolute companions, but to no purpose.  It was a life of danger and excitement—­of plans and projects, and changes, and chases, and unexpected encounters—­of retaliation, and, occasionally, the most dreadful revenge.  Such, however, was the state of society at that time, that those persons who had connected themselves with these desperate