To return now to Darby, whose steps have been directed, not exactly towards Constitution Cottage, but towards the spacious glebe-house of the Rev. Phineas Lucre, which brought him about a mile or two out of his way.  The fact is he was beginning to tire of M’Slime, who, whenever he had occasion for his services, was certain to shear him of his fees on the one hand precisely as M’Clutchy did on the other.  The change of agents was consequently of no advantage to him, as he had expected it would be; for such was the rapacity of the two harpies that each of them took as much as they could out of the unfortunate tenants, and left Darby little to comfort himself, with the exception of what he got by their virtuous example, an example which he was exceedingly apt to follow, if not to exceed.  For this reason he detested them both, and consequently felt a natural anxiety to set them together by the ears whenever he thought the proper occasion for it should arrive.  Now, an event had taken place the very day before this, which opened up to his mind a new plan of operations altogether.  This was the death of the under gaoler of Castle Cumber.  Darby began to think of this as a good speculation, should it succeed; but alas! upon second reflection there stood an insurmountable difficulty in his way.  He was a Roman Catholic so far as he was anything; and this being a situation of too much trust and confidence at the period to be given to any one of that persuasion, he knew he he could not obtain it.  Well, but here again he was fortunate, and not without the prospect of some consolation.  The extraordinary movement in the religious world, called the New Reformation, had just then set in with a liveliness of judgment, and a celerity of conversion among the lower classes of Roman Catholics, which scarcely anybody could understand.  The saints, however, or evangelical party, headed by an amiable, benevolent, but somewhat credulous nobleman, on whose property the movement first commenced, ascribed this extraordinary conversion altogether to themselves.

The season to be sure in which it occurred was one of unprecedented destitution and famine.  Fuel was both scarce and bad—­the preceding crops had failed, and food was not only of a deleterious quality, but scarcely to be procured at all.  The winter, too, was wet and stormy, and the deluges of rain daily and incessant.  In fact, cold, and nakedness, and hunger met together in almost every house and every cabin, with the exception of those of the farmers alone, who, by the way, mostly held land upon a very small scale.  In this district, then, and in such a period of calamity, and misery, and utter famine, did the movement called the New Reformation originate.