degrade and irritate him, where billiard-tables were rife, and brandy cheap; where virtue was easy, and restraint unnecessary; where no duties would harass him, no tenants upbraid him, no duns persecute him.  There, carefully guarding himself against the schemes of those less fortunate followers of pleasure among whom he would be thrown in his social hours, he would convert every shilling of his income to some purpose of self-enjoyment, and live a life of luxurious abandonment.  And he need not be altogether idle, he reflected within himself afterwards, as he was riding home:  he felt that he was possessed of sufficient energy and talent to make himself perfectly master of a pack of cards, to be a proficient over a billiard-table, and even to get the upper hand of a box of dice.  With such pursuits left to him, he might yet live to be talked of, feared, and wealthy; and Barry’s utmost ambition would have carried him no further.

As I said before, he yielded to the attorney, and commissioned him fully to treat with Martin Kelly in the manner proposed by himself.  Martin was to give him five hundred a-year for his share of the property, and three hundred pounds for the furniture, &c.; and Barry was to give his sister his written and unconditional assent to her marriage; was to sign any document which might be necessary as to her settlement, and was then to leave Dunmore for ever.  Daly made him write an authority for making such a proposal, by which he bound himself to the terms, should they be acceded to by the other party.

“But you must bear in mind,” added Daly, as his client for the second time turned from the door, “that I don’t guarantee that Martin Kelly will accept these terms:  it’s very likely he may be sharp enough to know that he can manage as well without you as he can with you.  You’ll remember that, Mr Lynch.”

“I will—­I will, Daly; but look here—­if he bites freely—­and I think he will, and if you find you could get as much as a thousand out of him, or even eight hundred, you shall have one hundred clear for yourself.”

This was Barry’s last piece of diplomacy for that day.  Daly vouchsafed him no answer, but returned into his office, and Barry mounted his horse, and returned home not altogether ill-pleased with his prospects, but still regretting that he should have gone about so serious a piece of business, so utterly unprepared.

These regrets rose stronger, when his after-dinner courage returned to him as he sate solitary over his fire.  “I should have had him here,” said he to himself, “and not gone to that confounded cold hole of his.  After all, there’s no place for a cock to fight on like his own dunghill; and there’s nothing able to carry a fellow well through a tough bit of jobation [33] with a lawyer like a stiff tumbler of brandy punch.  It’d have been worth a couple of hundred to me, to have had him out here—­impertinent puppy!  Well, devil a halfpenny I’ll pay him!” This thought was consolatory, and he began again to think of Boulogne.