to such a considerable sum, that Timothy was enabled to take a ground-floor near the College, and employ a couple of journeymen; but, for reasons best known to himself, he declined for some time moving from his cubiculum next the slates.

CHAPTER XI.

"Methinks he has no drowning marks upon him;
His complexion is perfect gallows.

He'll be hanged yet;

Though every drop of water swear against it,
And gape at wid'st to glut him."

Tempest.

M'FINN, to whose further proceedings we must now revert, remained the whole of the week succeeding the deeds of violence and bloodshed he had committed, secluded in his den, going out only at night, and wandering like a disturbed spirit through the low waste grounds that lay by the river-side, which, they being then but imperfectly enclosed, were flooded at every spring tide; where he might have been supposed to have held communication with the foe of mankind, for he was truly one of his agents, suggesting the lines of the poet :

"I have heard how desperate wretches like myself,
Have wandered out at this dead time of night,

And met the foe of mankind in his walks."

OTWAY.

At the end of the week his landlady brought him a piece of paper found thrust through the keyhole of the outside door, and asked if it was for him; he quickly perceived the purport of it, written in the cipher of the Provincial Committee, desiring him to repair that night to the old Castle of Bagot Rath, on the Black Rock road, where he would meet a person who would deliver his full instructions, with which he was to set out immediately.

When the appointed time approached, he took from his portmanteau his pistols, one of which had so lately been used in committing the foul deed of vengeance mentioned in the newspaper; having not only charged them on that occasion with a brace of bullets, but with the one cut in two which had been discharged at himself, and rammed them each down with the divided warrant, as if in defiance of all law, human and divine; he examined the undischarged one, and fresh priming, laid it beside the other on the table; when setting out, however, he by mistake placed the unloaded one in his breast pocket, and put the other back, and locked it carefully up.

In order to avoid all risks, he made his way along the north bank of the river, till he came to its extreme end, opposite the embouchure of the smaller river Dodder; here, giving a low whistle, the ferry-boat put out from the opposite side, and pulled across. The evening was clear,

and the moon shone brightly on the current of the river, which, it being the time of the springs, and much swollen by the late thaw, rushed impetuously down at nearly low water.

Having made his agreement with the ferrymen to take him across and back again in an hour, he seated himself in the stern, and they pushed out; one of them, however, he remarked, seemed to keep his eye very intently on him till they came into the most rapid part of the current, where something sweeping down with it struck the side of the boat so violently as nearly to turn her head seaward, and strike the oar out of the other's hand, and then rolled away, appearing and disappearing again in the tide, like the back of a huge porpoise.

"What was that, Tom, that struck the boat?" said Bill Hennesy, the owner.

"Bedad, I don't know," said the other; "but I was near losing the oar by it, anyhow."

Why didn't you strike the hook into it as it passed?" said Bill; "who knows but it might turn up a prize?"

passes

"It's gone down afore us," said Tom; "but if we pull hard, we'll overtake it before it the Dodder, where the cross current will delay it till we come up; the gentleman, I'm sure, wont begrudge us the time to reach it, and if it turns up anything good, why shure he will get his share as well as another."

During the whole of this conversation sensations of a fearful nature pervaded the mind of the passenger. By the pricking of his conscience he knew that something fraught with evil to himself was that way gone, and fain would have remonstrated, but fear of exciting suspicion restrained him; he imagined that some fresh rencontre with his old foe, not the effect of accident, but of diabolical contrivance, was at hand; some infernal device of him whom he often fancied he saw stalking before him through the swampy marshes on the river-side, and who he now supposed was dogging his steps with this terrible witness of his crime. His hat was

literally raised up from his clammy brow by the erection of his black bristling hair; the cold perspiration stood out in large drops on his face, and a dewy moisture overspread his whole body, while he sat enduring a species of agony, to which flaying alive could only approach; for though indurated against all natural apprehension from living objects, he was by so much the more in dread of supernatural. The boatmen, however, buoyed up by the expectation of booty, paid no attention to him.

"We are made men, as sure as a gun," cried Bill Hennesy; "if this turns up to be the body of M'Cance, it's a dead hundred in our pockets.”

In the mean time they had, by a few strong pulls, come up with the rolling mass; Tom, on