One more scrupulous might not exactly have fancied the office thus suggested to him. He, however, was rather pleased with the investigation, and having satisfied himself that the mission was safe, set forth to fulfil it. No. 4, as the stranger's room was called, was a large and lofty chamber, lighted by a single bay-window, the deep recess of which was occupied by a writing-table. Books, maps, letters, and drawings littered every part of the room. Costly weapons, too, such as richly chased daggers and inlaid pistols, lay carelessly about, with curiously shaped pipes and gold-embroidered tobacco-bags; a richly lined fur pelisse covered the sofa, and a skull-cap of the very finest sable lay beside it. All these were signs of affluence and comfort, and Mr. Merl pondered over them as he went from place to place, tossing over one thing after another, and losing himself in wild conjectures about the owner. The writing-table, we have said, was thickly strewn with letters, and to these he now addressed himself in all form, taking his seat comfortably for the investigation. Many of the letters were in foreign languages, and from remote and far-away lands. Some he was enabled to spell out, but they referred to places and events he had never heard of, and were filled with allusions he could not fathom. At length, however, he came to documents which interested him more closely. They were notes, most probably in the stranger's own hand, of his late tour along the coast. Mournful records were they all,--sad stories of destitution and want, a whole people struck down by famine and sickness, and a land perishing in utter misery. No personal narrative broke the dreary monotony of these gloomy records, and Merl searched in vain for what might give a clew to the writer's station or his object. Carefully drawn-up statistics, tables of the varying results of emigration, notes upon the tenure of land and the price of labor were all there, interspersed with replies from different quarters to researches of the writer's making. Numerous appeals to charity, entreaties for small loans of money, were mingled with grateful acknowledgments for benefits already received. There was much, had he been so minded, that Mr. Merl might have learned in this same unauthorized inquiry. There were abundant traits of the people displayed, strange insight into customs and ways peculiar to them, accurate knowledge, too, of the evils of their social condition; and, above all, there were the evidences of that curious compound of credulity and distrust, hope and fatalism, energy and inertness, which make up the Irish nature.