‘Phil Purcell, don’t you know me?’ shouted I; ‘it’s Redmond Barry.’

I thought the old man would have fired his piece at me at first, for he pointed it at the window; but I called to him to hold his hand, and came down and embraced him....  Psha!  I don’t care to tell the rest:  Phil and I had a long night, and talked over a thousand foolish old things that have no interest for any soul alive now:  for what soul is there alive that cares for Barry Lyndon?

I settled a hundred guineas on the old man when I got to Dublin, and made him an annuity which enabled him to pass his old days in comfort.

Poor Phil Purcell was amusing himself at a game of exceedingly dirty cards with an old acquaintance of mine; no other than Tim, who was called my ‘valet’ in the days of yore, and whom the reader may remember as clad in my father’s old liveries.  They used to hang about him in those times, and lap over his wrists and down to his heels; but Tim, though he protested he had nigh killed himself with grief when I went away, had managed to grow enormously fat in my absence, and would have fitted almost into Daniel Lambert’s coat, or that of the vicar of Castle Brady, whom he served in the capacity of clerk.  I would have engaged the fellow in my service but for his monstrous size, which rendered him quite unfit to be the attendant of any gentleman of condition; and so I presented him with a handsome gratuity, and promised to stand godfather to his next child:  the eleventh since my absence.  There is no country in the world where the work of multiplying is carried on so prosperously as in my native island.  Mr. Tim had married the girls’ waiting-maid, who had been a kind friend of mine in the early times; and I had to go salute poor Molly next day, and found her a slatternly wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of children almost as ragged as those of my friend the blacksmith.

From Tim and Phil Purcell, thus met fortuitously together, I got the very last news respecting my family.  My mother was well.

‘’Faith sir,’ says Tim, ’and you’re come in time, mayhap, for preventing an addition to your family.’

‘Sir!’ exclaimed I, in a fit of indignation.

‘In the shape of father-in-law, I mane, sir,’ says Tim:  ’the misthress is going to take on with Mister Jowls the praacher.’

Poor Nora, he added, had made many additions to the illustrious race of Quin; and my cousin Ulick was in Dublin, coming to little good, both my informants feared, and having managed to run through the small available remains of property which my good old uncle had left behind him.

I saw I should have no small family to provide for; and then, to conclude the evening, Phil, Tim, and I, had a bottle of usquebaugh, the taste of which I had remembered for eleven good years, and did not part except with the warmest terms of fellowship, and until the sun had been some time in the sky.  I am exceedingly affable; that has always been one of my characteristics.  I have no false pride, as many men of high lineage like my own have, and, in default of better company, will hob and nob with a ploughboy or a private soldier just as readily as with the first noble in the land.