“Well, ’tis Mat Meehan has it, sir:  and he’s out this half-hour, sir; I can’t stay in, sir—­iplrfff—­iphfff!”

“You want to be idling your time looking at the gintleman, Phelim.”

“No, indeed, sir—­iphfff!”

“Phelim, I know you of ould—­go to your sate.  I tell you, Phelim, you were born for the encouragement of the hemp manufacture, and you’ll die promoting it.”

In the meantime, the master puts his head out of the door, his body stooped to a “half bend”—­a phrase, and the exact curve which it forms, I leave for the present to your own sagacity—­and surveys you until you pass.  That is an Irish hedge school, and the personage who follows you with his eye, a hedge schoolmaster.  His name is Matthew Kavanagh; and, as you seem to consider his literary establishment rather a curiosity in its kind, I will, if you be disposed to hear it, give you the history of him and his establishment, beginning, in the first place, with

THE ABDUCTION OF MAT KAVANAGH,

THE HEDGE SCHOOLMASTER.

For about three years before the period of which I write, the village of Findramore, and the parish in which it lay, were without a teacher.  Mat’s predecessor was a James Garraghty, a lame young man, the son of a widow, whose husband lost his life in attempting to extinguish a fire that broke out in the dwelling-house of Squire Johnston, a neighboring magistrate.  The son was a boy at the time of this disaster, and the Squire, as some compensation for the loss of his father’s life in his service, had him educated at his own expense; that is to say, he gave the master who taught in the village orders to educate him gratuitously, on the condition of being horsewhipped out of the parish, if he refused.  As soon as he considered himself qualified to teach, he opened a school in the village on his own account, where he taught until his death, which happened in less than a year after the commencement of his little seminary.  The children usually assembled in his mother’s cabin; but as she did not long survive the son, this, which was at best a very miserable residence, soon tottered to the ground.  The roof and thatch were burnt for firing, the mud gables fell in, and were overgrown with grass, nettles, and docks; and nothing remained but a foot or two of the little clay side-walls, which presented, when associated with the calamitous fate of their inoffensive inmates, rather a touching image of ruin upon a small scale.

Garraghty had been attentive to his little pupils, and his instructions were sufficient to give them a relish for education—­a circumstance which did not escape the observation of their parents, who duly appreciated it.  His death, however, deprived them of this advantage; and as schoolmasters, under the old system, were always at a premium, it so happened, that for three years afterwards, not one of that class presented himself to their acceptance.  Many a