But I used the word Irish adjectively and with the same amount of qualification that one employs to a diamond, and indeed, as I have read it in a London paper, to a lord. An American officer, of whom I saw much at the time, was my guide to the interior of Mexico: he had been in the Santa Fé expedition, was a man of most adventurous disposition, with a love for stirring incident and peril which even broken health and a failing constitution could not subdue. It was often very difficult for me to tear myself away from his Texan and Mexican experiences,--his wild scenes of prairie life, or his sojourn amongst Indian tribes--and to keep to the more commonplace events of my own story. Nor could all my entreaties confine him to descriptions of those places and scenes which I needed for my own characters. The saunter after tea-time with this companion, generally along that little river that tumbles through the valley of the Bagni di Lucca, was the usual preparation for my night’s work; and I came to it as intensely possessed by Mexico--dress, manner, and landscape--as though I had been drawing on the recollections of a former journey. So completely separated in my mind by the different parts of the day were the two tales, that no character of ‘The Daltons’ ever crossed my mind after nightfall, nor was there a trace of ‘Con Cregan’ in my head at breakfast next morning. None of the characters of ‘Con Cregan’ has been taken from life. The one bit of reality is in the sketch of Anticosti, where I myself suffered once a very small shipwreck, of which I retain a very vivid recollection to this hour. I have already owned that I bore a grudge to the story; nor have I outlived the memory of the chagrin it cost me, though it is many a year since I acknowledged that ‘Con Cregan’ was written by the author of ‘Harry Lorrequer.’ ‘THE MARTINS OF CRO-MARTIN.’