A friend to whose inspection I submitted the preceding pages suggested that as they detailed many mistakes and peccadillos of others, a reader might consider it an agreeable variety if I inserted a couple of errors peculiarly mine own. In accordance with his opinion I have to mention that shortly after I assumed magisterial duties at Kingstown, the proprietor of an extensive hotel in the immediate vicinity of the police-court received several letters threatening speedy and fatal violence to him and his family, unless certain demands on the part of his waiters, postillions, and carters, were complied with. He was justly incensed and alarmed at such threats, and submitted the obnoxious documents to the consideration of the authorities and to the detective agencies of the police force. His garden wall was close to the yard of the police-court, between which and the sea no building at that time intervened. It happened that an official, connected with the fiscal business of the county of Meath, had embezzled a considerable sum and attempted to abscond, but was captured on shipboard at Kingstown, and committed for further examination. The delinquent had provided himself with a most ample outfit for emigration and residence abroad; and the articles found in his possession were deposited in a room adjoining the police-court and overlooking the hotel garden. Amongst them was a rifled air-gun of great power, and after the business of the court had been disposed of, I was, along with the chief clerk, Mr. Lees, indulging my curiosity by pumping and discharging the weapon. There was a bag of small bullets, of which we directed two or three at the wall of the yard. An unfortunate cat chanced to make her appearance in the hotel garden at a distance of fifty or sixty yards, and exclaiming that "I would give puss a start," I sent a bullet in her direction, without the slightest expectation that the shot would be fatal. The cat fell dead on the garden walk; we closed the window, locked up the gun and bullets, and departed. Next morning, I was about to commence the charge-sheets, when the proprietor of the hotel applied most earnestly for a private interview. He was greatly agitated, and declared that he felt convinced of his life being in danger from those who threatened to assassinate him. "Your worship," he added, "they are manifestly bent on mischief, for our poor cat was found dead in the garden, and on examination she was found to have been shot. The fellow who killed her, did so only to show that I might expect the same treatment if an opportunity offered for shooting me." The poor man little knew that the weapon which inflicted the injury was in the apartment where he was expressing his direful apprehensions, and that he was seeking the sympathies and protection of him who had done the mischief. I took means, through a particular channel, to disabuse his mind of the feeling that the cat's