had not a boat; that his fowling convenience and fishing tackle were not in trim for our use; in short he seemed to feel a double pang that he was a poor man.-But who was Jack M'Swine? The lineal descendant of the ancient sept of the M'Swines, who next and only inferior to the O'Donnels, possessed a large portion of Tyrconnel. Our friend of Glen Veagh maintained that he was the M'Swine na Doo-the Caunfinny or head of the family, and surrounded by poverty as we saw him, the dweller of the wretched hut, without one shilling of income, with nothing to live on but the produce of his potato garden, and the milk of a few cows that ranged the mountains, yet Philip the Second of Spain ruling over dominions on which the sun never set, was not prouder in his bearing, nor richer in the recollections of his Austrian ancestry, than this fading shadow of an Irish Tanist: the man literally lived, moved and had his being as dependent on his family associations; and still life was only supportable under the one hope which he cherished.

The

Amidst chilling discouragements, insurmountable obstacles, and endless rebuffs, he had now come to the verge of the grave; grey he stood and tempest worn, like one of the withering oaks on the side of Glen Veagh, and still he put forth the leaf and struggled for existence, hoping against hope. M'Swines, as proprietors of a large portion of the mountain district of Donegal, had usually sided with the O'Neils against the O'Donnels; and O'Neil's demand of sixty cows as tribute from O'Donnel, was often enforced by the assistance of M'Swine; and when James I. conquered the O'Donnels, and escheated their lands, as a reward to M'Swine for his opposition to this chieftain, his mountains, perhaps because not worth confiscating, were left to him in peace, and in the following reign of Charles, when the execrable rebellion of 1641, broke out, the M'Swine for some reason did not join in it; there was no proof of massacre or murder against him, and the Act of Settlement left

him his property as an innocent Papist.

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Here then down to the present century the M'Swines lived, the lords paramount of these glens and mountains, in barbarous and profuse hospitality,―here surrounded by followers and retainers, amidst fosterers and cohershers, their hall full of horse boys, and dog boys, and cow boys,—all idlers, all gentlemen; all disdaining any trade or occupapation,-fishing, fowling, hunting or fighting by day; feasting, quarrelling and carousing by night, thus the M'Swines from father to son lived; borrowing money, and mortgaging one mountain tract or line of sea after another. This is the common history of an Irish Castle-Rackrent family, and thus the common fate of the Sir Thadys and Sir Condys of Ireland attended the M'Swines, and our poor friend Jack came into the world the inheritor of his forefathers' name, pride, recollections and imprudencies; but alas! his lands had all vanished and become under foreclosed mortgages, the properties of families who possessed the low-born English and Scotch propensity of foresight and

frugality; and still Jack M'Swine clung to the hope and expectation of recovering some of his alienated lands; he told us how certain tracts were illegally conveyed away from him by his father, and he besought me with all the anxiety of a man who was catching at vague impossibilities, that I would search the records in Dublin Castle for him, and make out his title. No one could possibly have seen this fine old man, so tall, so meagre, and yet so decent, in his coarse attire, and so urbane and so gracious in the oldfashioned manner of the last century, without wishing that some portion of the wide domains of his ancestors was restored to him, and that his grey hairs might descend in decency to the grave;-or rather it would better become my desire and my prayer to turn these immoderate hopes, these ceaseless anxieties from such unreal fancies, from these fallacies of earthly ambition, to seek a property in a better country-an inheritance with the saints in light: desiring to be found in Christ, clothed in his righteousness, endowed with

his unspeakable gifts, and possessing his unsearchable riches. Every year this hearty

old Milesian comes down from his mountain glen, and spends a day at the hospitable glebe-house of my friend, and he regularly brings to the younger part of the family an appropriate present; a gift which from the remotest times a king might accept, and a noble might bestow-a young eagle or jer-falcon of the true hunting breed, from the cliffs of Glen Veagh. Before I left the country, this genuine gentleman brought me such a present as a grateful recompence (the only one he could bestow,) for the hearty interest and attention which I, as he said, condescended to take in the fallen fortunes of poor John M'Swine.

We proceeded on from Glen Veagh to the hospitable mansion at Ards, before referred to, and where the contrast presented by a beautifully planted and ornamented demesne, and by the accurate row-culture and farming, worthy of Norfolk or the Lothians, to the mountains, moors and wastes we passed over,