A smart young officer is taken up at one of the barrack-gates, but being told by the guard that there was an old lady inside, he declines to enter, and jumps up beside the coachman. Imagine his chagrin on discovering, when the coach stops at Kinigad, how grossly he had been deceived. “What!” he exclaims, as Miss Owenson is about to step out; “‘let such a foot as that sink in the snow?—never!’ ... and he actually carried me in his arms into the kitchen, and placed me in an old arm-chair before a roaring turf-fire.” Of course he did, and of course he was overawed and subdued when he heard that Mr Featherstone’s carriage and horses were waiting to carry the young lady to Bracklin. But what must the astonishment of the quiet country family have been when the future governess of their children walked in, “pinched, cold, confused, and miserable, in a balldress and pink silk shoes and stockings, without an article wherewith to change, her luggage having gone forward with the mail?” All, however, comes right in the end. The old gentleman looks grave, the young ladies laugh; mamma puts the stranger in charge of her future pupils, who dress her up in suits of their own. There is a capital dinner—she sings ‘_Emunch ach Nuic_’ (‘Ned of the Hills’), and ‘Barbara Allen’ (we presume, at the dinner-table), and after tea the whole entertainment is wound up with a dance, in which Miss Owenson comes off with flying colours. Why could not the old lady stop there? “Public for public,” she continues, in her imbecility. “It may be worth while here to contrast my last jig in public with this my first out of the schoolroom. During the Viceroyalty of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, by whose attentions I was much distinguished, as indeed were all my family, it happened that Lord George Hill came on a little embassy from Her Excellency to beg that I would dance an Irish jig with him, as she had heard of my performance with Lady Glengall in a preceding reign. He said if I would consent I should choose either the Castle or the Viceregal Lodge for the exhibition, and that his brother, Lord Downshire, would write to Hillsboro’ for his own piper, who was then reckoned the best in Ireland. As it was to be a private and not a court exhibition, my husband permitted me to accept the challenge from the two best jig-dancers in the country, Lord George himself and Sir Philip Crampton. I had the triumph of flooring my two rivals. Lord George soon gave in, and the Surgeon-General felt a twinge of gout, he said, which obliged him to retire from the lists.”