But I can’t expect you, my reader—­polite and patient as you manifestly are—­to potter about with me, all the summer day, through this melancholy and mangled old town, with a canopy of factory soot between your head and the pleasant sky.  One glance, however, before you go, you will vouchsafe at the village tree—­that stalworth elm.  It has not grown an inch these hundred years.  It does not look a day older than it did fifty years ago, I can tell you.  There he stands the same; and yet a stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless, busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race.  Thou hast a story, too, to tell, thou slighted and solitary sage, if only the winds would steal it musically forth, like the secret of Mildas from the moaning reeds.

The palmy days of Chapelizod were just about a hundred years ago, and those days—­though I am jealous of their pleasant and kindly fame, and specially for the preservation of the few memorials they have left behind, were yet, I may say, in your ear, with all their colour and adventure—­perhaps, on the whole, more pleasant to read about, and dream of, than they were to live in.  Still their violence, follies, and hospitalities, softened by distance, and illuminated with a sort of barbaric splendour, have long presented to my fancy the glowing and ever-shifting combinations upon which, as on the red embers, in a winter’s gloaming, I love to gaze, propping my white head upon my hand, in a lazy luxury of reverie, from my own arm-chair, while they drop, ever and anon, into new shapes, and silently tell their ’winter’s tales.’

When your humble servant, Charles de Cresseron, the compiler of this narrative, was a boy some fourteen years old—­how long ago precisely that was, is nothing to the purpose, ’tis enough to say he remembers what he then saw and heard a good deal better than what happened a week ago—­it came to pass that he was spending a pleasant week of his holidays with his benign uncle and godfather, the curate of Chapelizod.  On the second day of his, or rather my sojourn (I take leave to return to the first person), there was a notable funeral of an old lady.  Her name was Darby, and her journey to her last home was very considerable, being made in a hearse, by easy stages, from her house of Lisnabane, in the county of Sligo, to the church-yard of Chapelizod.  There was a great flat stone over that small parcel of the rector’s freehold, which the family held by a tenure, not of lives, but of deaths, renewable for ever.  So that my uncle, who was a man of an anxious temperament, had little trouble in satisfying himself of the meerings and identity of this narrow tenement, to which Lemuel Mattocks, the sexton, led him as straight and confidently as he could have done to the communion-table.