"Merry times? I suppose they were," said Nellie good-naturedly, trying to lead poor Grannie's thoughts back to the good old times when she was young and happy. "Tell me about it now, dear Grannie, (my mother's coming home, I mean,) that I may amuse myself by thinking it all over again, when I am far away in the lone west, and no good old Grannie to go and have a gossip with when I am tired of my own company." "Why, you see, Miss Nellie, and you mustn't be offended if I say it," said Grannie, eagerly seizing on this new turn given to her ideas; "we weren't too well pleased at first to hear that the young master was to be wedded in foreign parts, and some of us were even bold enough to ask if there weren't girls fair enough, ay, and good enough too, for that matter, for him in Ireland, that he must needs bring a Saxon to reign over us! However, when the old lord up yonder at the castle, came down and told us how she had sent him word, that for all she had the misfortune to be English born, she meant, once she was married in Ireland, to be more Irish than the Irish themselves, then, I promise you, every vein in our hearts warmed toward her; and on the day of her coming home, there wasn't, if you'll believe me, a man, woman, or child, within ten miles of Netterville, who didn't go out to meet her, until, what with the shouting and the hustling, she began to think, (the creature,) as she has often told me since, that it was going to massacre her, may be, that we were; for sure, until the day she first saw the young master, it was nothing but tales upon tales she had heard of how the wild Irish were worse than the savages themselves, and how murder and robbery were as common and as little thought of with us as daisies in the springtime. Any way, if she thought that for a moment, she didn't think it long; for when she faced round upon us at the castle-gates, standing between her husband and her father-in-law, (the old lord himself,) we gave her a cheer that might have been heard from this to Tredagh, if the wind had set that way; and though she didn't then understand the '_Cead-mille-failthe_ to your ladyship!' that we were shouting in our Irish, she was cute enough, at all events, to guess by our eyes and faces what our tongues were saying. And that wasn't all," continued Grannie, growing more and more garrulous as she warmed to her theme; "that wasn't all neither; for when the people were so tired they could shout no more, and quiet was restored, she whispered something to the young master; and what do you think he did, my dear, but led her right down to the place where me and my son (his own foster-brother, that's gone, God rest him!) were standing in the crowd, and she put out her pretty white hand and said, (it was the first and last time that ever I liked the sound of the English,) 'It is you, then, that was my husband's foster-mother, isn't it?' And says I, in her own tongue, for I had picked up