Mr. O'Boyneville bestowed a friendly nod upon his admirers. He had all that easy consciousness of his own abilities, and good-natured wish not to be proud, which seems a distinguishing characteristic of the Hibernian mind. He pushed his way upward, nodding right and left, but his mind was at that moment full of a great case of Vendors and Purchasers, speedily to be decided in one of the Courts of Equity, in which some Irish slate-quarries were distractingly involved with the operations of a gigantic builder, and in which innumerable folios of affidavits had been filed on both sides. The great barrister was by no means a party-going man, and the gilded youth made merry upon the antediluvian cut of his dress-coat, the yellow tinge of his cambric cravat, and the high shirt-collars which fenced his massive jaws, as he passed out of their ken. He came to Dr. Molyneux's ball only because the doctor was his personal friend, and had carried him through a very sharp attack of brain fever induced by overwork; but he would fain have taken his red bag with him, and, ensconced in some obscure corner, have refreshed himself with a dip into the great slate case. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with massively cut features, a mouth and chin that were almost classic in their modelling, strongly marked eyebrows, and large bright blue eyes--the eyes that are better adapted to "threaten and command" than to melt with tenderness or darken with melancholy. Nobody had ever called him handsome, nobody had ever called him plain. In his face and figure alike there was a daring that was almost insolence, a manliness that approached nobility. He was the man of men to wear a barrister's wig and gown, to wind himself into the innermost souls of irresolute jurymen, and to freeze the heart's blood of timid witnesses. When something less than forty, Laurence O'Boyneville had found himself the most successful man of his age, far higher on the ladder of fortune than many men who were twenty years his senior and who had worked well too in their time. But to the Irish lawyer had been given an indomitable energy, which is so good a substitute for the sacred fire of genius, that it is very apt to be mistaken for that supernal flame. Nature had bestowed upon him, and education had sharpened, a rapidity of perception that was almost like inspiration; and the more desperate the case he had undertaken, the more brilliant was his handling of its difficulties, the more daring his defiance of his opponent. He had the true warrior spirit, and rose with the desperation of anticipated defeat. His greatest triumphs had been achieved by movements as wildly hazardous as the charge of the six hundred at Balaclava.