This having been the manner in which the Squire was said to have evaded the duel, it is unnecessary to say that Art’s readiness to refresh his memory on the subject prevented him from being received at the Big House in future.

Reader, remember that we only intended to give you a sketch of Phelim O’Toole’s courtship.  We will, however, go so far beyond our original plan, as to apprise you of his fate.

When it became known in the parish that he was in jail, under a charge of felony, Sally Mattery abandoned all hopes of securing him as a husband.  The housekeeper felt suitable distress, and hoped, should the poor boy be acquitted, that he might hould up his head wid any o’ them.  Phelim, through the agency of his father, succeeded in getting ten guineas from her, to pay the lawyers for defending him; not one penny of which he applied to the purpose for which he obtained it.  The expenses of his defence were drawn from the Ribbon fund, and the Irish reader cannot forget the eloquent and pathetic, appeal made by his counsel to the jury, on his behalf, and the strength with which the fact of his being the whole support of a helpless father and mother was stated.  The appeal, however, was ineffectual; worthy Phelim was convicted, and sentenced to transportation for life.  When his old acquaintances heard the nature of his destiny, they remembered the two prophecies that had been so often uttered concerning him.  One of them was certainly fulfilled to the letter—­we mean that in which it was stated, “that the greatest swaggerer among the girls generally comes to the wall at last.”  The other, though not literally accomplished, was touched at least upon the spirit; transportation for life ranks next to hanging.  We,cannot avoid mentioning a fact connected with Phelim which came to light while he remained in prison.  By incessant trouble he was prevailed upon, or rather compelled, to attend the prison school, and on examining him, touching his religion? knowledge, it appeared that he was ignorant of the plainest truths of Christianity; that he knew not how or by whom the Christian religion had been promulgated; nor, indeed, any other moral truth connected with Revelation.

Immediately after his transportation, Larry took to drink, and his mother to begging, for she had no other means of living.  In this mode of life, the husband was soon compelled to join her.  They are both mendicants, and Sheelah now appears sensible of the error in their manner of bringing Phelim up.

“Ah!  Larry,” she is sometimes heard to say, “I doubt that we wor wrong for flyin’ in the face o’ God, becase He didn’t give us childhre.  An’ when it plased Him to grant us a son, we oughtn’t to ’ve spoiled him by over-indulgence, an’ by lettin’ him have his own head in everythin’ as we did.  If we had sint him to school, an’ larned him to work, an’ corrected him when he desarved it, instead of laughin’ at his lies, an’ misbehavior, and his oaths, as if they wor sport—­ay,