be the goodness of God: a firm conviction that all his struggles are watched and cared for, and that every little turn of good fortune has been given him by some especial favour, lies deep in his nature, and suggests an amount of hope to him which a less sanguine spirit could never have conceived. While I thought over the endless contrarieties of this mysterious national character, where good and evil eternally lay side by side, I wondered within myself whether the new civilisation of latter years was likely to be successful in dealing with men whose temperaments and manners were so unlike the English, or were we right in extinguishing the old feudalism that bound the peasant to the landlord, ere we had prepared each for the new relations of mere gain and loss that were in nature to subsist between them? Between the great families--the old houses of the land and the present race of proprietors--there lay a couple of generations of men who, with all the traditions and many of the pretensions of birth and fortune, had really become in ideas, modes of life, and habits, very little above the peasantry about them. They inhabited, it is true, the “great house,” and they were in name the owners of the soil, but, crippled by debt and overborne by mortgages, they subsisted in a shifty conflict with their creditors, rack-renting their miserable tenants to maintain it. Survivors of everything but pride of family, they stood there like stumps, blackened and charred, the last remnants of a burnt forest, their proportions attesting the noble growth that preceded them. What would the descendants of these men prove when, destitute of fortune and helpless, they were thrown upon a world that actually regarded them as blamable for the unhappy condition of Ireland? Would they stand by “their order” in so far as to adhere to the cause of the gentry? Or would they share the feelings of the peasant to whose lot they had been reduced, and charging on the Saxons the reverses of their fortune, stand forth as rebels to England? Here was much food for speculation and something for a story. For an opening scene what could I desire finer than the gloomy grandeur and the rugged desolation of Glenflesk! And if some patches of bright verdure here and there gleamed amidst the barrenness,--if a stray sunbeam lit up the granite cliffs and made the heather glow,--might there not be certain reliefs of human tenderness and love to show that no scene in which man has a part is utterly destitute of those affections whose home is the heart? I had now got my theme and my locality. For my name I took ‘The O’Donoghue’; it had become associated in my mind with Glenflesk, and would not be separated from it. Here, then, in one word, is the history of this book. If the performance bears but slight relation to the intention,--if, indeed, my story seems to have little reference to what suggested it,--it will only be another instance of a waywardness which has beset me through life,