of a friend of mine was entered on a Sunday night, and by means of handbills four of the thieves were secured on the Monday, and tried and transported on the Tuesday. But fifty years ago this could not have been done in a country place. The traveller had to wade through mud and deep ruts, along our well-frequented roads; and if assailed it was impossible to fly. Desperate bands of thieves made nocturnal assaults upon solitary houses; and, long ere a hue and cry could be raised, they had vanished into woods and heaths, or had fled beyond the slow flight of lumbering mails, and newspapers that did not reach their readers sometimes for a fortnight. Those were the times for fearful tragedies in lonely dwellings, which even yet furnish thrilling themes for winter firesides. There is an account of the attack of the house of Colonel Purcell, which appeared in the newspapers at the time, and was twice reprinted in the Kaleidoscope, a Liverpool literary paper; the last time soon after the gallant Colonel’s death, in 1822, which, although it belongs to Ireland, a country whence not volumes, but whole libraries of such recitals might be imported, I shall insert here, because it so well illustrates the sort of horrors to which lonely houses were, in this country, formerly very much exposed; and from which they are not now entirely exempt; and because perhaps no greater instance of manly courage is upon record. A similar one, of female intrepidity, in a young woman who defended a toll-bar, in which she was alone, against a band of thieves, and shot several of them, I recollect seeing some years ago in the newspapers. EXTRAORDINARY INTREPIDITY OF SIR JOHN PURCELL. At the Cork Assizes, Maurice Noonan stood indicted for a burglary, and attempting to rob the house of Sir John Purcell, at Highfort, on the night of the 11th of March, 1812.