“What’s this you say your name is?”

“Sol Donnel.”

“What do you mean by Sol?”

He turned up his red eyes in astonishment, and exclaimed: 

“Well, now, to think that, a larned man as you must be shouldn’t know what Sol means!  Well, the ignorance of you great people is unknown.  Don’t you know—­but you don’t—­oughn’t you know, then, that Sol means Solomon, who was the wisest many and the biggest blaggard that ever lived!  Faith, if I had lived in his day he’d be a poor customer to me, bekaise he had no shame in him; but indeed, the doin’s that goes on now in holes and corners among ourselves was no shame in his time.  That’s a fine bay horse you ride; would you like to have him dappled?  A dappled bay, you know, is always a great beauty.”

“And could you dapple him?

“Ay, as sure as you ride him.”

“Well, I’ll think about it and let you know; there’s some silver for you, and good-by, honest Solomon.”

Woodward then rode on, reflecting on the novel and extraordinary character of this hypocritical old villain, in whose withered and repulsive visage he could not discover a single trace of anything that intimated the existence of sympathy with his kind.  As to that, it was a tabula rasa, blank of all feelings except those which characterize the hyena and the fox.  After he had left him, the old fellow gave a bitter and derisive look after him.

“There you go,” said he, “and well I knew you, although you didn’t think so.  Weren’t you pointed out to me the night o’ the divil’s bonfire, that your mother, they say, got up for you; and didn’t I see you since spakin’ to that skamin’ blaggard, Caterine Collins, my niece, that takes many a penny out o’ my hands; and didn’t I know that you couldn’t be talkin’ to her about anything that was good.  Troth, you’re not your mother’s son or you’ll be comin’ to me as well as her.  Bad luck to her! she was near gettin’ me into the stocks when I sowld her the dose of oak bark for the sarvants, to draw in their stomachs and shorten their feedin’.  My faith, ould Lindsay ’ud have put me in them only for bringin’ shame upon his wife."*

* Some of our readers may imagine that in the enumeration of the cures which old Sol professed to effect we have drawn too largely upon their credulity, whereas there is scarcely one of them that, is not practised, or attempted, in remote and uneducated parts of Ireland, almost down to the present day.  We ourselves in early youth saw a man who professed, and was believed to be able, to cure jealousy in either man or woman by a potion; whilst charms for colics, toothaches, taking motes out of the eye, and for producing love, were common among the ignorant people within our own recollection.

CHAPTER VIII.  A Healing of the Breach.

—­A Proposal for Marriage Accepted.

On that evening, when the family were assembled at supper, Mrs. Lindsay, who had had a previous consultation with her son Harry, thought proper to introduce the subject of the projected marriage between him and Alice Goodwin.