For a week after my arrival at Kilrush, my life was one of the most dreary monotony.  The rain, which had begun to fall as I left Limerick, continued to descend in torrents, and I found myself a close prisoner in the sanded parlour of “mine inn.”  At no time would such “durance vile” have been agreeable; but now, when I contrasted it with all I had left behind at head quarters, it was absolutely maddening.  The pleasant lounge in the morning, the social mess, and the agreeable evening party, were all exchanged for a short promenade of fourteen feet in one direction, and twelve in the other, such being the accurate measurement of my “salle a manger.”  A chicken, with legs as blue as a Highlander’s in winter, for my dinner; and the hours that all Christian mankind were devoting to pleasant intercourse, and agreeable chit-chat, spent in beating that dead-march to time, “the Devil’s Tattoo,” upon my ricketty table, and forming, between whiles, sundry valorous resolutions to reform my life, and “eschew sack and loose company.”

My front-window looked out upon a long, straggling, ill-paved street, with its due proportion of mud-heaps, and duck pools; the houses on either side were, for the most part, dingy-looking edifices, with half-doors, and such pretension to being shops as a quart of meal, or salt, displayed in the window, confers; or sometimes two tobacco-pipes, placed “saltier-wise,” would appear the only vendible article in the establishment.  A more wretched, gloomy-looking picture of woe-begone poverty, I never beheld.

If I turned for consolation to the back of the house, my eyes fell upon the dirty yard of a dirty inn; the half-thatched cow-shed, where two famished animals mourned their hard fate,—­“chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy;” the chaise, the yellow post-chaise, once the pride and glory of the establishment, now stood reduced from its wheels, and ignominiously degraded to a hen-house; on the grass-grown roof a cock had taken his stand, with an air of protective patronage to the feathered inhabitants beneath: 

“To what base uses must we come at last.”

That chaise, which once had conveyed the blooming bride, all blushes and tenderness, and the happy groom, on their honeymoon visit to Ballybunion and its romantic caves, or to the gigantic cliffs and sea-girt shores of Moher—­or with more steady pace and becoming gravity had borne along the “going judge of assize,”—­was now become a lying-in hospital for fowl, and a nursery for chickens.  Fallen as I was myself from my high estate, it afforded me a species of malicious satisfaction to contemplate these sad reverses of fortune; and I verily believe—­for on such slight foundation our greatest resolves are built—­that if the rain had continued a week longer, I should have become a misanthropist for life.  I made many inquiries from my landlady as to the society of the place, but the answers I received only led to greater despondence.  My