such little playful badinage ever led to some friendly passages of taking wine together, or in arrangements for a party to the “Dargle,” or “Dunleary;” and thus went on the entire party, the young ladies darting an occasion slight at their elders, who certainly returned the fire, often with advantage; all uniting now and then, however, in one common cause, an attack of the whole line upon Mrs. Clanfrizzle herself, for the beef, or the mutton, or the fish, or the poultry—­each of which was sure to find some sturdy defamer, ready and willing to give evidence in dispraise.  Yet even these, and I thought them rather dangerous sallies, led to no more violent results than dignified replies from the worthy hostess, upon the goodness of her fare, and the evident satisfaction it afforded while being eaten, if the appetites of the party were a test.  While this was at its height, Tom stooped behind my chair, and whispered gently—­

“This is good—­isn’t it, eh?—­life in a boarding-house—­quite new to you; but they are civilized now compared to what you’ll find them in the drawing-room.  When short whist for five-penny points sets in—­then Greek meets Greek, and we’ll have it.”

During all this melee tournament, I perceived that the worthy jib as he would be called in the parlance of Trinity, Mr. Cudmore, remained perfectly silent, and apparently terrified.  The noise, the din of voices, and the laughing, so completely addled him, that he was like one in a very horrid dream.  The attention with which I had observed him, having been remarked by my friend O’Flaherty, he informed me that the scholar, as he was called there, was then under a kind of cloud—­an adventure which occurred only two nights before, being too fresh in his memory to permit him enjoying himself even to the limited extent it had been his wont to do.  As illustrative, not only of Mr. Cudmore, but the life I have been speaking of, I may as well relate it.

Soon after Mr. Cudmore’s enlistment under the banners of the Clanfrizzle, he had sought and found an asylum in the drawing-room of the establishment, which promised, from its geographical relations, to expose him less to the molestations of conversation than most other parts of the room.  This was a small recess beside the fire-place, not uncommon in old-fashioned houses, and which, from its incapacity to hold more than one, secured to the worthy recluse the privacy he longed for; and here, among superannuated hearth-brushes, an old hand screen, an asthmatic bellows, and a kettle-holder, sat the timid youth, “alone, but in a crowd.”  Not all the seductions of loo, limited to three pence, nor even that most appropriately designated game, beggar-my-neighbour—­could withdraw him from his blest retreat.  Like his countryman, St. Kevin—­my friend Petrie has ascertained that the saint was a native of Tralee—­he fled from the temptations of the world, and the blandishments of the fair; but, alas! like the saint himself, the