I was now about nineteen, strong, active, and could leap two-and-twenty feet on a dead level; but though thoroughly acquainted with Irish life among my own class, I was as ignorant of the world as a child.  Ever since my boyhood, in consequence of the legends which I had heard from my father, about the far-famed Lough-derg, or St. Patrick’s Purgatory, I felt my imagination fired with a romantic curiosity to perform a station at that celebrated place.  I accordingly did so, and the description of that most penal performance, some years afterwards, not only constituted my debut in literature, but was also the means of preventing me from being a pleasant, strong-bodied parish priest at this day; indeed, it was the cause of changing the whole destiny of my subsequent life.

“The Loughderg Pilgrim” is given in the present edition, and may be relied on, not so much as an ordinary narrative, as a perfect transcript of what takes place during the stations which are held there in the summer months.

Having returned from this, I knew not exactly how to dispose of myself.  On one thing I was determined—­never to enter the Church;—­but this resolution I kept faithfully to myself.  I had nothing for it now but to forget my sacerdotal prospects, which, as I have said, had already been renounced, or to sink down as many others like me had done, into a mere tiller of the earth,—­a character in Ireland far more unpopular than that which the Scotch call “a sticket minister!”

It was about this period, that chance first threw the inimitable Adventures of the renowned Gil Bias across my path.  During my whole life I had been an insatiable reader of such sixpenny romances and history-books as the hedge-schools afforded.  Many a time have I given up my meals rather than lose one minute from the interest excited by the story I was perusing.  Having read Gil Bias, however, I felt an irrepressible passion for adventure, which nothing could divert; in fact, I was as much the creature of the impulse it excited, as the ship is of the helmsman, or the steam-engine of the principle that guides it.

Stimulated by this romantic love of adventure, I left my native place, and directed my steps to the parish of Killanny, in the county of Louth, the Catholic clergyman of which was a nephew of our own Parish Priest, brother to him who proposed going to Munster with me, and an old school-fellow of my own, though probably twenty years my senior.  This man’s residence was within a quarter or half a mile’s distance of the celebrated Wild-goose Lodge, in which, some six months before, a whole family, consisting of, I believe, eight persons, men, women, and children, had been, from motives of personal vengeance, consumed to ashes.  I stopped with him for a fortnight, and succeeded in procuring a tuition in the house of a wealthy farmer named Piers Murphy, near Corcreagh.  This, however, was a tame life, and a hard one, so I resolved once more to give up a miserable salary