PREFACE.

The incidents of the following story occurred in the years 1817 and 1818, a short time before the writer came to reside in Dublin. With the exception of two or three flying visits which he paid not long afterwards, he has never since been gladdened by the sight of his native mountains. The manuscript was finished early in June, 1856, and the contents have no reference to matters connected with Wexford which have happened since the date of the tale. The writer is possessed of no reliable information as to the present relations of landlord and tenant in his native county, as to the abandonment of old roads or the positions of new ones. He has never even mastered the easy science of political economy, and any Enniscorthy green‐grocer, leaning over his half‐door on a Sunday evening, is fully qualified to give him a useful lesson on Wexford politics.

The chief incidents, circumstances, and fireside conferences mentioned in this volume really occurred, and the strangest among them are those in which the writer has kept closest to the original facts. He would not have ventured to introduce some of them had they been pure inventions.

The tale is somewhat clogged by various phases and incidents of ordinary country life, but the writer was more p. vi anxious to preserve the faithful memory of these things than to produce a well‐constructed story.

The reader is entitled to some apology for the personal intrusion of the chronicler into his history, and here it is. In 1856, when the following pages were written, he neither wished nor expected that his name should ever be seen as author on the title‐page of a book. Accordingly, retaining his alias of Harry Whitney, which he had assumed with his first attempt, “The Legends of Mount Leinster,” he ventured to take up a quiet position among the kindly personages of his new drama, saying little and doing less, but still slightly accelerating the progress of the story. By the advice of Mr. Macmillan, the eminent publisher of the “Fictions of the Irish Celts,” which appeared last October, he acknowledged the authorship, and any further persistence in disguise would be mere affectation. In revising the manuscript for press he would have removed his double altogether, but found that the process would be equivalent to the reconstruction of a considerable portion of the work. For this operation time and patience were needful, and of neither valuable commodity was there any provision at hand. Such being the case the considerate reader will please to show indulgence, and look on the writer as a hearty sympathiser with the spirit of the inscription which, as the late estimable scholar, Mr. Patrick Vincent Fitz‐Patrick, author of Thaumaturgus, asserted was to be seen in his day on the frieze of the temple at Sais in Egypt:

“Know all ye who come into the world, And all ye who go out, That the Gods detest impudence.”