“I am that, sir; and likewise the postmaster, the physician, the precepthor, the tax-collector, the clerk of the parish, the poor law guardian and the attorney; not to mintion the proud hereditary post to which I’ve already adverted, that of bard and historian to The O’Mahony. But, sir, I see that your family carriage is at the dure. We’ll be startin’ now, if it’s your pleazure. It’s a long journey we’ve before us.” When the bill had been called for and paid by O’Daly, and they had reached the street, The O’Mahony surveyed with a lively interest the strange vehicle drawn up at the curb before him. In principle it was like the outside cars he had yesterday seen for the first time, but much lower, narrower and longer. The seats upon which occupants were expected to place themselves back to back, were close together, and cushioned only with worn old pieces of cow-skin. Between the shafts was a shaggy and unkempt little beast, which was engaged in showing its teeth viciously at the children and the dog. The whole equipage looked a century old at the least. At the end of four hours the rough-coated pony was still scurrying along the stony road at a rattling pace. It had galloped up the hills and raced down into the valleys with no break of speed from the beginning. The O’Mahony, grown accustomed now to maintaining his seat, thought he had never seen such a horse before, and said so to O’Daly, who sat beside him, Jerry and the bag being disposed on the opposite side, and the driver, a silent, round-shouldered, undersized young man sitting in front with his feet on the shafts. “Ah, sir, our bastes are like our people hereabouts,” replied the bard--“not much to look at, but with hearts of goold. They’ll run till they fall. But, sir--halt, now, Malachy!--yonder you can see Muirisc.” The jaunting-car stopped. The April twilight was gathering in the clear sky above them, and shadows were rising from the brown bases of the mountains to their right. The whole journey had been through a bleak and desolate moor and bog land, broken here and there by a lonely glen, in the shelter of which a score of stone hovels were clustered, and to which all attempts at tillage were confined. Now, as The O’Mahony looked, he saw stretched before him, some hundred feet below, a great, level plain, from which, in the distance, a solitary mountain ridge rose abruptly. This plain was wedgeshaped, and its outlines were sharply defined by the glow of evening light upon the waters surrounding it--waters which dashed in white-breakers against the rocky coast nearest by, but seemed to lie in placid quiescence on the remote farther shore. It was toward this latter dark line of coast, half-obscured now as they gazed by rising sea-mists, that O’Daly pointed; and The O’Mahony, scanning the broad, dusky landscape, made out at last some flickering sparks of reddish light close to where the waters met the land.