“Do,” said Connor, “an' leave us the moment you bring him.” It was more than an hour before the man I returned, holding Fardorougha by the arm, and, after having left him in the cell, he instantly locked it outside, and withdrew as he had been desired. Connor ran to support his tottering steps; and wofully indeed did unfortunate parent stand in need of his assistance. In the picture presented by Fardorougha the unhappy young man forgot in a moment his own miserable and gloomy fate. There blazed in his father's eyes an excitement at once dead and wild--a vague fire without character, yet stirred by an incomprehensible energy wholly beyond the usual manifestations of thought or suffering. The son on beholding him shuddered, and not for the first time, for he had on one or two occasions before become apprehensive that his father's mind might, if strongly pressed, be worn down, by the singular conflict of which it was that scene, to that most frightful of all maladies--insanity. As the old man, however, folded him in his feeble arms, and attempted to express what he felt, the unhappy boy groaned aloud, and felt even in the depth of his cell, a blush of momentary shame suffuse his cheek and brow. His father, notwithstanding the sentence that had been so shortly before passed upon his son--that father, he perceived to be absolutely intoxicated, or, to use a more appropriate expression, decidedly drunk. There was less blame, however, to be attached to Fardorougha on this occasion, than Connor imagined. When the old man swooned in the court-house, he was taken by his neighbors to a public-house, where he lay for some minutes in a state of insensibility. On his recovery he was plied with burnt whiskey, as well to restore his strength and prevent a relapse, as upon the principle that it would enable him to sustain with more firmness the dreadful and shocking destiny which awaited his son. Actuated by motives of mistaken kindness, they poured between two and three glasses of this fiery cordial down his throat, which, as he had not taken so much during the lapse of thirty years before, soon reduced the feeble old man to the condition in which we have described him when entering the gloomy cell of the prisoner. “Father,” said Connor, “in the name of Heaven above, who or what has put you into this dreadful state, especially when we consider the hard, hard fate that is over us, and upon us?” “Connor,” returned Fardorougha, not perceiving the drift of his question, “Connor, my son, I'll hang--hang him, that's one comfort.” “Who are you spaking about?” “The villain sentence was passed on to--to--day. He'll swing--swing for the robbery; P----e will. We got him back out of that nest of robbers, the Isle o' Man--o' Man they call it--that he made off to, the villain!” “Father dear, I'm sorry to see you in this state on sich a day--sich a black day to us. For your sake I am. What will the world say of it?”