“Came half an hour since, sir, in a chaise and four,” said the guard, as he banged the door behind him, and closed the interview.

Whatever might have been the reasons for my fellow-traveller’s anxiety about my name and occupation, I knew not, yet could not help feeling gratified at thinking that as I had not given my name at the coach office, I was a great a puzzle to him as he to me.

“A severe night, sir,” said I, endeavouring to break ground in conversation.

“Mighty severe,” briefly and half crustily replied the unknown, with a richness of brogue, that might have stood for a certificate of baptism in Cork or its vicinity.

“And a bad road too, sir,” said I, remembering my lately accomplished stage.

“That’s the reason I always go armed,” said the unknown, clinking at the same moment something like the barrel of a pistol.

Wondering somewhat at his readiness to mistake my meaning, I felt disposed to drop any further effort to draw him out, and was about to address myself to sleep, as comfortably as I could.

“I’ll jist trouble ye to lean aff that little parcel there, sir,” said he, as he displaced from its position beneath my elbow, one of the paper packages the guard had already alluded to.

In complying with this rather gruff demand, one of my pocket pistols, which I carried in my breast pocket, fell out upon his knee, upon which he immediately started, and asked hurriedly—­“and are you armed too?”

“Why, yes,” said I, laughingly; “men of my trade seldom go without something of this kind.”

“Be gorra, I was just thinking that same,” said the traveller, with a half sigh to himself.

Why he should or should not have thought so, I never troubled myself to canvass, and was once more settling myself in my corner, when I was startled by a very melancholy groan, which seemed to come from the bottom of my companion’s heart.

“Are you ill, sir?” said I, in a voice of some anxiety.

“You might say that,” replied he—­“if you knew who you were talking to —­although maybe you’ve heard enough of me, though you never saw me till now.”

“Without having that pleasure even yet,” said I, “it would grieve me to think you should be ill in the coach.”

“May be it might,” briefly replied the unknown, with a species of meaning in his words I could not then understand.  “Did ye never hear tell of Barney Doyle?” said he.

“Not to my recollection.”

“Then I’m Barney,” said he; “that’s in all the newspapers in the metropolis; I’m seventeen weeks in Jervis-street hospital, and four in the Lunatic, and the devil a better after all; you must be a stranger, I’m thinking, or you’d know me now.”

“Why I do confess, I’ve only been a few hours in Ireland for the last six months.”

“Ay, that’s the reason; I knew you would not be fond of travelling with me, if you knew who it was.”