* The couples are shaped like the letter A, and sustain
     the roof; the bauks, or rafters, cross them from one
     side to another like the line inside the letter.

Whilst these successive processes went forward, many others had been engaged all the morning cutting rushes; and the scraws were no sooner laid on, than half a dozen thatchers mounted the roof, and long before the evening was closed, a school-house, capable of holding near two hundred children, was finished.  But among the peasantry no new house is ever put up without a hearth-warming and a dance.  Accordingly the clay floor was paired—­a fiddler procured—­Barny Brady and his stock of poteen sent for; the young women of the village and surrounding neighborhood attended in their best finery; dancing commenced—­and it was four o’clock the next morning when the merry-makers departed, leaving Mat a new home and a hard floor, ready for the reception of his scholars.

Business now commenced.  At nine o’clock the next day Mat’s furniture was settled in a small cabin, given to him at a cheap rate by one of the neighboring farmers; for, whilst the school-house was being built, two men, with horses and cars, had gone to Clansallagh, accompanied by Nancy, and removed the furniture, such as it was, to their new residence.  Nor was Mat, upon the whole, displeased at what had happened; for he was now fixed in a flourishing country—­fertile and well cultivated; nay, the bright landscape which his school-house commanded was sufficient in itself to reconcile him to his situation.  The inhabitants were in comparatively good circumstances; many of them wealthy, respectable farmers, and capable of remunerating him very decently for his literary labors; and what was equally flattering, there was a certainty of his having a numerous and well-attended school in a neighborhood with whose inhabitants he was acquainted.

Honest, kind-hearted Paddy!—­pity that you should ever feel distress or hunger—­pity that you should be compelled to seek, in another land, the hard-earned pittance by which you keep the humble cabin over your chaste wife and naked children!  Alas! what noble materials for composing a national character, of which humanity might be justly proud, do the lower orders of the Irish possess, if raised and cultivated by an enlightened education!  Pardon me, gentle reader, for this momentary ebullition; I grant I am a little dark now.  I assure you, however, the tear of enthusiastic admiration is warm on my eye-lids, when I remember the flitches of bacon, the sacks of potatoes, the bags of meal, the miscowns of butter, and the dishes of eggs—­not omitting crate after crate of turf which came in such rapid succession to Mat Kavanagh, during the first week on which he opened his school.  Ay, and many a bottle of stout poteen, when

“The eye of the gauger saw it not,”

was, with a sly, good-humored wink, handed over to Mat, or Nancy, no matter which, from under the comfortable drab jock, with velvet-covered collar, erect about the honest, ruddy face of a warm, smiling farmer, or even the tattered frieze of a poor laborer—­anxious to secure the attention of the “masther” to his little “Shoneen,” whom, in the extravagance of his ambition, he destined to “wear the robes as a clargy.”  Let no man say, I repeat, that the Irish are not fond of education.