It was on a disagreeable, cold, sloppy, raw, winter evening--an evening drizzling sometimes with rain, and sometimes with sleet--that an elderly man was driven up to the door of the hotel on a one-horse car--or jingle, as such conveniences were then called in the south of Ireland. He seemed to know the house, for with his outside coat all dripping as it was he went direct to the bar-window, and as Fanny O'Dwyer opened the door he walked into that warm precinct. There he encountered a gentleman, dressed one would say rather beyond the merits of the establishment, who was taking his ease at full length on Fanny's sofa, and drinking some hot compound which was to be seen in a tumbler on the chimney-shelf just above his head. It was now six o'clock in the evening, and the gentleman no doubt had dined. "Well, Aby; here I am, as large as life, but as cold as death. Ugh; what an affair that coach is! Fanny, my best of darlings, give me a drop of something that's best for warming the cockles of an old man's heart." "A young wife then is the best thing in life to do that, Mr. Mollett," said Fanny, sharply, preparing, however, at the same time some mixture which might be taken more instantaneously. "The governor's had enough of that receipt already," said the man on the sofa; or rather the man now off the sofa, for he had slowly arisen to shake hands with the new comer. This latter person proceeded to divest himself of his dripping greatcoat. "Here, Tom," said he, "bring your old Cyclops eye to bear this way, will you. Go and hang that up in the kitchen; not too near the fire now; and get me something to eat: none of your mutton chops; but a beefsteak if there is such a thing in this benighted place. Well, Aby, how goes on the war?" It was clear that the elderly gentleman was quite at home in his present quarters; for Tom, far from resenting such impertinence, as he would immediately have done had it proceeded from an ordinary Kanturk customer, declared "that he would do his honour's bidding av there was such a thing as a beefsteak to be had anywhere's in the city of Cork."