My companions wended their way through the dense throng like practised travellers, often cutting off an angle by a dive through the two doors of a whiskey shop, and occasionally making a great short-cut by penetrating through a house and the court behind it,--little exploits in geography expiated by a volley of curses from the occupants, and sometimes an admonitory brickbat in addition. The uniform good temper they exhibited; the easy freedom with which they submitted to the rather rough jocularities of the passers-by,--the usual salute being a smart slap on the crown of the head, administered by the handicraft tool of the individual, and this sometimes being an iron trowel or a slater's hammer,--could not but exalt them in my esteem as the most patient set of varlets I had ever sojourned with. To my question as to why we were going so far, and whither our journey tended, I got for answer the one short reply,--"We must go to 'ould Betty's.'" Now, as I would willingly spare as much of this period's recital to my reader as I can, I will content myself with stating that "ould Betty," or Betty Cobbe, was an old lady who kept a species of ordinary for the unclaimed youth of Dublin. They were fed and educated at her seminary; the washing cost little, and they were certainly "done" for at the very smallest cost, and in the most remarkably brief space of time. If ever these faint memorials of a life should be read in a certain far-off land, more than one settler in the distant bush, more than one angler in the dull stream of Swan River, will confess how many of his first sharp notions of life and manners were imbibed from the training nurture of Mrs. Elizabeth Cobbe. Betty's proceedings, for some years before I had the honor and felicity of her acquaintance, had attracted towards her the attention of the authorities. The Colonial Secretary had possibly grown jealous; for she had been pushing emigration to Norfolk Island on a far wider scale than ever a cabinet dreamed of; and thus had she acquired what, in the polite language of our neighbors, is phrased the "Surveillance of the Police,"--a watchful superintendence and anxious protectorate, for which, I grieve to say, she evinced the very reverse of gratitude. Betty had, in consequence, and in requirement with the spirit of the times--the most capricious spirit that ever vexed plain, old-fashioned mortals--reformed her establishment; and from having opened her doors, as before, to what, in the language of East Indian advertisements, are called "a few spirited young men," she had fallen down to that small fry who, in various disguises of vagrancy and vagabondage, infest the highways of a capital.