Perhaps I am a little too sensitive on this point; but my reader will forgive any excess of irritability when I tell him that to this national ardor for brick and mortar--this passion for cutstone and stucco--it is I owe, not only some of the mischances of my life, but also a share of what destiny has in store for those that are to come after me. We came over to Ireland with Cromwell; my ancestor, I believe, and I don't desire to hide the fact, was a favorite trumpeter of Old Noll. He was a powerful, big-boned, slashing trooper, with a heavy hand on a sabre, and a fine deep, bass voice in the conventicle; and if his Christian name was a little inconvenient for those in a hurry,--he was called Bind-your-kings-in-chains-and-your-nobles-in-links-of-iron Carew,--it was of the less consequence, as he was always where he ought to be, without calling. It was said that in the eyes of his chief his moderation was highly esteemed, and that this virtue was never more conspicuous than in his choice of a recompense for his services; since, instead of selecting some fine, rich tract of Meath or Queen's County, some fruitful spot on the Shannon or the Blackwater, with a most laudable and exemplary humility he pitched upon a dreary and desolate region in the County Wicklow,--picturesque enough in point of scenery, but utterly barren and uncultivated. Here, at a short distance from the opening of the Vale of Arklow, he built a small house, contiguous to which, after a few years, was to be seen an outlandish kind of scaffolding,--a composite architecture between a draw-well and a gallows; and which, after various conjectures about its use,--some even suggesting that it was a new apparatus “to raise the Devil,”--turned out to be the machinery for working a valuable lead mine which, by “pure accident,” my fortunate ancestor had just discovered there.