We have already stated that O’Driscol’s real character was thoroughly known by the country-folks around him, as the character of every such person usually is.  Whilst he proceeds, then, upon his daring and heroic enterprise, we beg leave to state very briefly, that Fergus and Alick Purcel, having laid their heads together, procured, each, two of their father’s laborers, whom they furnished material wherewith to blacken their faces; not omitting four large cabbage-stalks, with the heads attached, and kept under the right arm of each.  These had been trimmed and blackened also, in order to have more the appearance of fire-arms.  Thus armed, and with appropriate instructions, they planted themselves inside the hedges which inclosed the narrow turn of the road at Philpot’s cornet, and awaited their “unsuspecting victim,” as the phrase unhappily, and with too much truth, goes.

O’Driscol, on approaching the fatal spot, regretted that there were no eyes upon this extraordinary manifestation of courage.  He stretched up his neck and looked about him in all directions, with a hope that some one might observe the firmness and utter absence of all fear with which he came up to the place where the assassins were to lie in wait for him.  He had now come within ten or twelve yards of it when, such was the force of his own cowardly imagination, that it had worked him up from a fictitious into a real terror; and on approaching the spot, he could not prevent himself from coughing pretty loudly, in order to ascertain that there really was no such thing as ah assassin behind the hedges.  He coughed, we say, with a double case of pistols in his hand, when, heaven and earth! was the cough responded to—­and in a jarring style—­from behind the hedge to the right?  He paused, pulled up his horse, and coughed again, when it also was responded to from that on the left; and at the same time four faces, dreadfully blackened, peeped, two on each side of him, and levelling their black and dreadful-looking blunderbusses—­for they could be nothing else—­were about to rid the world of a loyal magistrate, and deprive the Castle of its best friend and correspondent, when the latter gentleman, wheeling Duke Schomberg round, put him to most inglorious flight, and scampered off at the top of his speed.

The jest was admirably managed; and nothing could exceed the unction with which he related his encounter with the villains.  In fact, upon Falstaff’s principle, he had discharged his pistols on the way home, as a proof of the desperate contest he had had with the blood-thirsty scoundrels.  Like all his other exploits, however, it was added to the catalogue of his daring conflicts with the Whiteboys, and, ere the lapse of twenty-four hours, was in possession of “his friend the Castle.”

CHARTER XV.—­Scene in a Parsonage—­An Anti-Tithe Ringleader.