Street Theatre; who, during his life in Dublin, had done many things which he ought not to have done, and had probably made as many omissions of things which it had behoved him to do.  He had that knowledge of the persons of his fellow-citizens, which appears to be so much more general in Dublin than in any other large town; he could tell you the name and trade of every one he met in the streets, and was a judge of the character and talents of all whose employments partook, in any degree, of a public nature.  His name was Kelly; and, as his calling was that of an attorney’s clerk, his knowledge of character would be peculiarly valuable in the scene at which he and his companion were so anxious to be present.

[Footnote 7:  Conciliation Hall, Dublin, was built in 1843 as a
meeting place for O’Connell’s Repeal Association.]

The younger of the two brothers, for such they were, was a somewhat different character.  Though perhaps a more enthusiastic Repealer than his brother, he was not so well versed in the details of Repeal tactics, or in the strength and weakness of the Repeal ranks.  He was a young farmer, of the better class, from the County Mayo, where he held three or four hundred wretchedly bad acres under Lord Ballindine, and one or two other small farms, under different landlords.  He was a good-looking young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, with that mixture of cunning and frankness in his bright eye, which is so common among those of his class in Ireland, but more especially so in Connaught.

The mother of these two young men kept an inn in the small town of Dunmore, and though from the appearance of the place, one would be led to suppose that there could not be in Dunmore much of that kind of traffic which innkeepers love, Mrs Kelly was accounted a warm, comfortable woman.  Her husband had left her for a better world some ten years since, with six children; and the widow, instead of making continual use, as her chief support, of that common wail of being a poor, lone woman, had put her shoulders to the wheel, and had earned comfortably, by sheer industry, that which so many of her class, when similarly situated, are willing to owe to compassion.

She held on the farm, which her husband rented from Lord Ballindine, till her eldest son was able to take it.  He, however, was now a gauger [8] in the north of Ireland.  Her second son was the attorney’s clerk; and the farm had descended to Martin, the younger, whom we have left jostling and jostled at one of the great doors of the Four Courts, and whom we must still leave there for a short time, while a few more of the circumstances of his family are narrated.

[Footnote 8:  gauger—­a British revenue officer often engaged in
the collection of duties on distilled spirits.]