“Sweet as the shepherd’s pipe upon the mountains.”

Many a time, too, have I been gratified, in the same poetical hour, by the sweet sound of honest Ned M’Keown’s ungreased cartwheels, clacking, when nature seemed to have fallen asleep after the day-stir and animation of rural business—­for Ned was sometimes a carman—­on his return from Dublin with a load of his own groceries, without as much money in his pocket as would purchase oil wherewith to silence the sounds which the friction produced—­regaling his own ears the while, as well as the music of the cart would permit his melody to be heard, with his favorite tune of Cannie Soogah.*

     * “The Jolly Pedlar,”—­a fine old Irish air.

Honest, blustering, good-humored Ned was the indefatigable merchant of the village; ever engaged in some ten or twenty pound speculation, the capital of which he was sure to extort, perhaps for the twelfth time, from the savings of Nancy’s frugality, by the equivocal test of a month or six weeks’ consecutive sobriety, and which said speculation he never failed to wind up by the total loss of the capital for Nancy, and the capital loss of a broken head for himself.  Ned had eternally some bargain on his hands:  at one time you might see him a yarn-merchant, planted in the next market-town upon the upper step of Mr. Birney’s hall-door, where the yarn-market was held, surrounded by a crowd of eager country-women, anxious to give Ned the preference, first, because he was a well-wisher; secondly, because he hadn’t his heart in the penny; and thirdly, because he gave sixpence a spangle more than any other man in the market.

There might Ned be found; with his twenty pounds of hard silver jingling in the bottom of a green bag, as a decoy to his customers, laughing loud as he piled the yarn in and ostentatious heap, which in the pride of his commercial sagacity, he had purchased at a dead loss.  Again you might see him at a horse-fair, cantering about on the back of some sleek but broken-winded jade, with spavined legs, imposed on him as “a great bargain entirely,” by the superior cunning of some rustic sharper; or standing over a hogshead of damaged flaxseed, in the purchase of which he shrewdly suspected himself of having overreached the seller—­by allowing him for it a greater price than the prime seed of the market would have cost tim.  In short, Ned was never out of a speculation, and whatever he undertook was sure to prove a complete failure.  But he had one mode of consolation, which consisted in sitting down with the fag-end of Nancy’s capital in his pocket, and drinking night and day with this neighbor and that, whilst a shilling remained; and when he found himself at the end of his tether, he was sure to fasten a quarrel on some friend or acquaintance, and to get his head broken for his pains.

None of all this blustering, however, happened within the range of Nancy’s jurisdiction.  Ned, indeed, might drink and sing, and swagger and fight—­and he contrived to do so; but notwithstanding all his apparent courage, there was one eye which made him quail, and before which he never put on the hector;—­there was one, in whose presence the loudness of his song would fall away into a very awkward and unmusical quaver, and under whose glance his laughing face often changed to the visage of a man who is disposed to anything but mirth.