The package of letters was a large one, of all sizes. From all quarters they came—some from home; some from my brother officers of the Guards; some from the Castle; and even one from O'Grady.

The first I opened was a short note from Horton, the private secretary to the viceroy. This informed me that Major Mahon had written a statement to the duke of all the circumstances attending my duel; and that his grace had not only expressed himself highly satisfied with my conduct, but had ordered a very polite reply to be addressed to the Major, thanking him for his great kindness, and saying with what pleasure he found that a member of his staff had fallen into such good hands.

'His grace desires me to add,' continued the writer, 'that you need only consult your own health and convenience with respect to your return to duty; and, in fact, your leave of absence is perfectly discretionary.'

My mind relieved of a weighty load by the contents of this letter, I recovered my strength already so far that I sat up in bed to peruse the others. My next was from my father; it ran thus:—

'Dear Jack,—Your friend Major Mahon, to whom I write by this post, will deliver this letter to you when he deems fit. He has been most good-natured in conveying to me a narrative of your late doings; and I cannot express how grateful we all are to him for the truly friendly part he has taken towards you. After the strictest scrutiny, for I confess to you I feared lest the Major's might be too partial an account, I rejoice to say that your conduct meets with my entire approbation. An older and a wiser head might, it is possible, have avoided some of the difficulties you have met with; but this I will add, that once in trouble, no one could have shown better temper or a more befitting spirit than you did. While I say this, my dear Jack, understand me clearly that I speak of you as a young, inexperienced man, thrown, at his very outset of life, not only among strangers, but in a country where, as I remarked to you at first, everything was different from those in your own. You have now shown yourself equal to any circumstances in which you may be placed. I therefore not only expect that you will meet with fewer embarrassments in future, but that, should they arise, I shall have the satisfaction of finding your character and your habits will be as much your safeguard against insult as your readiness to resent any will be sure and certain.

'I have seen the duke several times, and he expresses himself as much pleased with you. From what he mentions, I can collect that you are well satisfied with Ireland, and therefore I do not wish to remove you from it. At the same time, bear in mind, that by active service alone can you ever attain to, or merit, rank in the army; and that hitherto you have only been a soldier by name.'

After some further words of advice respecting the future, and some few details of family matters, he concluded by entrusting to my mother the mention of what she herself professed to think lay more in her peculiar province.

As usual, her letter opened with some meteorological observations upon the climate of England for the preceding six weeks; then followed a journal of her own health, whose increasing delicacy, and the imperative necessity of being near Doctor Y———, rendered a journey to Ireland too dangerous to think of.

'Yes, my dearest boy,' wrote she, 'nothing but this would keep me from you a moment; however, I am much relieved at learning that you are now rapidly recovering, and hope soon to hear of your return to Dublin. It is a very dreadful thing to think of, but perhaps, upon the whole, it is better that you did kill this Mr. Burke. De Grammont tells me that a mauvaise tÊte like that must be shot sooner or later. It makes me nervous to dwell on this odious topic, so that I shall pass on to something else.

'The horrid little man that brought your letters, and who calls himself a servant of Captain O'Grady, insisted on seeing me yesterday. I never was more shocked in my life. From what he says, I gather that he may be looked on as rather a favourable specimen of the natives. They must indeed be a very frightful people; and although he assured me he would do me no injury, I made Thomas stay in the room the entire time, and told Chubbs to give the alarm to the police if he heard the slightest noise. The creature, however did nothing, and I have quite recovered from my fear already.

'What a picture, my dear boy, did he present to me of your conduct and habits! Your intimacy with that odious family I mentioned in my last seems the root of all your misfortunes. Why will such people thrust themselves forward? What do they mean by inviting you to their frightful parties? Have they not their own peculiar horrors?—not but I must confess that they are more excusable than you; and I cannot conceive how you could so soon have forgotten the lessons instilled into you from your earliest years. As your poor dear grandfather, the admiral, used to say, a vulgar acquaintance is a shifting sand; you can never tell where you won't meet it—always at the most inopportune moment; and then, if you remark, your underbred people are never content with a quiet recognition, but they must always indulge in a detestable cordiality there is no escaping from. Oh, John, John! when at ten years of age you made the banker's son at Northampton hold your stirrup as you mounted your pony, I never thought I should have this reproach to make you.

'The little fiend who calls himself Corny something, also mentions your continued familiarity with the young woman I spoke of before. What her intentions are is perfectly clear; and should she accomplish her object your position in society and future fortune might possibly procure her large damages; but pause, my dear boy, before you go any further. I do not speak of the moral features of the case, for you are of an age to judge of them yourself; but think, I beseech you, of the difficulties it will throw around your path in life, and the obstacles it will oppose to your success. There is poor Lord Henry Effingham; and since that foolish business with the clergyman's wife or daughter, where somebody went mad, and some one else drowned or shot himself, they have never given him any appointment whatever. The world is a frightful and unforgiving thing, as poor Lord Henry knows; therefore beware!

'The more I think of it, the more strongly do I feel the force of my first impressions respecting Ireland; and were it not that we so constantly hear of battles and bloodshed in the Peninsula, I should even prefer your being there. There would seem to be an unhappy destiny over everything belonging to me. My poor dear father, the admiral, had a life of hardship, almost unrewarded. For eleven years he commanded a guardship in the Nore; many a night have I seen him, when I was a little girl, come home dripping with wet, and perfectly insensible from the stimulants he was obliged to resort to, and be carried in that state to his bed; and after all this he didn't get his blue ribbon till he was near sixty.

'De Vere is constantly with us, and is, I remark, attentive to your cousin Julia. This is not of so much consequence, as I hear that her Chancery suit is taking an unhappy turn; should it be otherwise, your interests will, of course, be looked to. De Vere is most amusing, and has a great deal of wit; but for him and the Count we should be quite dreary, as the season is over, and we can't leave town for at least three weeks. [The epistle concluded with a general summing up of its contents, and an affectionate entreaty to bear in mind her caution regarding the Rooneys.] Once more, my dear boy, remember that vulgar people are a part of our trials in this life. As that delightful man, the Dean of St. George's, says, they are snares for our feet; and their subservient admiration of us is a dangerous and a subtle temptation. Read this letter again, and believe me, my dearest John, your affectionate and unhappy mother,

'Charlotte Hinton.'

I shall not perform so undutiful a task as to play the critic on my excellent mother's letter. There were, it is true, many new views of life presented to me by its perusal, and I should feel sadly puzzled were I to say at which I was more amused or shocked—at the strictness of her manners, or the laxity of her morals; but I confess that the part which most outraged me of all was the eulogy on Lord Dudley de Vere's conversational gifts. But a few short months before, and it is possible I should not only have credited but concurred in the opinion; brief, however, as had been the interval, it had shown me much of life; it had brought me into acquaintance, and even intimacy, with some of the brightest spirits of the day; it had taught me to discriminate between the unmeaning jargon of conventional gossip and the charm of a society where force of reasoning, warmth of eloquence, and brilliancy of wit contested for the palm; it had made me feel that the intellectual gifts reserved in other countries for the personal advancement of their owner by their public and ostentatious display, can be made the ornament and the delight of the convivial board, the elegant accompaniment to the hours of happy intercourse, and the strongest bond of social union. So gradually had this change of opinion crept over me that I did not recognise in myself the conversion; and indeed had it not been for my mother's observations on Lord Dudley, I could not have credited how far my convictions had gone round. I could now understand the measurement by which Irishmen were estimated in the London world. I could see that if such a character as De Vere had a reputation for ability, how totally impossible it was for those who appreciated him to prize the great and varied gifts of such men as Grattan and Curran, and many more.

Lost in such thoughts, I forgot for some moments that O'Grady's letter lay open before me. It was dated Chatham, and written the night before he sailed. The first few lines showed me that he knew nothing of my duel, having only received my own letter with an account of the steeplechase. He wrote in high spirits. The Commander-in-chief had been most kind to him, appointing him to a vacant Majority—not, as he anticipated, in the Forty-first, but in the Ninth light Dragoons.

'I am anxiously looking out for Corny,' said he, 'and a great letter-bag from Ireland—the only bit of news from which, except your own, is that the Rooneys have gone into deep mourning, themselves and their whole house. Various rumours are afloat as to whether any money speculations of Paul's may have suggested the propriety of retrenchment, or whether there may not have been a death in the royal family of OToole. Look to this for me, Hinton; for even in Canada I shall preserve the memory of that capital house, its excellent cuisine, its charming hostess. Cultivate them, my dear Jack, for your sake and for mine. One Rembrandt is as good as a gallery; so sit down before them, and make a study of the family.'

The letter concluded as it began, by hearty thanks for the service I had rendered him, begging me to accept of Moddiridderoo as a souvenir of his friendship. And in a postscript, to write which the letter had evidently been reopened, was a warning to me against any chance collision with Ulick Burke.

'Not, my dear boy, because he is a dead shot—although that same is something—but that a quarrel with him could scarcely be reputable in its commencement, and must be bad whatever the result.'

After some further cautioning on this matter, the justice of which was tolerably evident from my own experience, O'Grady concluded with a hurried postscript:—

'Corny has not yet arrived, and we have received our orders for embarkation within twenty-four hours. I begin half to despair of his being here in time. Should this be the case, will you, my dear Hinton, look after the old villain for me, at least until I write to you again on the subject?'

While I was yet pondering on these last few lines, I perceived that a card had fallen from my father's letter. I took it up, and what was my astonishment to find that it contained a correct likeness of Corny Delany, drawn with a pen, underneath which was written, in my cousin Julia's hand, the following few lines:—

'The dear old thing has waited three days, and I think I have at length caught something like him. Dear Jack, if the master be only equal to the man, we shall never forgive you for not letting us see him.—Yours, Julia.'

This, of course, explained the secret of Corny's delay—my cousin, with her habitual wilfulness, preferring the indulgence of a caprice to anything resembling a duty; and I now had little doubt upon my mind that O'Grady's fears were well founded, and that he had been obliged to sail without his follower.

The exertion it cost me to read my letters, and the excitement produced by their perusal, fatigued and exhausted me, and as I sank back upon my pillow I closed my eyes and fell sound asleep, not to wake until late on the following day. But strange enough, when I did so, it was with a head clear and faculties collected, my mind refreshed by rest unbroken by a single dream; and so restored did I feel, that, save in the debility from long confinement to bed, I was unconscious of any sense of malady.

From this hour my recovery dated. Advancing every day with rapid steps, my strength increased; and before a week elapsed, I so far regained my lost health that I could move about my chamber, and even lay plans for my departure.