Just now the excitement amongst the groups at Salter’s is growing intense. The curate had been knocked down. No! But he had fallen—and so on, and so on. A few shops lower down comes Mr. Murphy, the undertaker’s. He, too, as indeed do all the shopkeepers in Curraghcloyne, stands in the front of his shop-door, chatting to all who come and go. A little, fat, jolly man, rather useless you would think in a solemn business like his, and yet the best undertaker, for all that, in the seven parishes round. Perhaps it is well to have a cheerful person of that sort to dispel the dreadful gloom of death. However it is, he is a universal favourite, and no wonder, when I tell you he is the man in all Curraghcloyne who can tell you most about the babies!—the ones come, the ones to come immediately, and those in the middle distance! The gayest, happiest little man in the town, with a wife as rosy as himself, and quite a crowd of embryo little undertakers swarming round his knees. But these, and many more of the Curraghcloyne celebrities, sink into insignificance before Ricketty, the proprietor of the Crosby Arms Hotel. This name is painted on a swinging signboard, with a huge boar beneath, the crest of the Crosbys from all time. Ricketty—his name was once Richards, but time and many devoted friendships has brought it down to Ricketty—is a huge benign Irishman, with the biggest jaw in Europe and the smallest eyes. To his bones flesh has grown, until now he might have exhibited himself in the most fastidious show in New York as the ‘Last of the race of Anak,’ or some such attractive title. And as most big men are, so is he—the mildest-mannered man on earth; who would have run away if he had been asked to scuttle a ship, and who would have fainted if the idea of cutting the throat even of a mouse had been suggested to him. One side of his hotel has the usual bar blind up in it, behind which is a parlour, where on special occasions the politicians congregate to air their eloquence. The other side is given up to a fancy shop, kept by his sister, Miss Ricketty. Miss Ricketty is the wit, and therefore the scourge, of the village (very little wit suffices for a village such as Curraghcloyne), and though nearly stone-deaf, knows more of the ‘goings on’ of her neighbours than anyone else in the small town. Of course there is a bank and a post-office in Curraghcloyne. And a town-hall, where the future tenors and sopranos of the world sometimes ‘kindly consent’ to sing to the poor people round them. And there is the draper’s shop called ‘The Emporium,’ very justly, of course; and there is a market-place too, where everyone says the beef and mutton are both bad and dear. But even the interest of all these fails before the caustic tongue of Miss Ricketty.