“True for ye, ma'am dear, it is smoking up to the nines, sure enough, but it's by no manner o' manes unwholesome, more particularly at this season, when it's so could; it will clear, my lady, in a minute – see, it's moving off now.”

“Moving up, you mean,” replied the young lady to whom this speech was addressed, and whose eye followed the thick and curling smoke that twisted and twisted, in serpent-like folds, around the blackened rafters of “Mr. Corney Phelan's Original Inn,” – so, at least, the dwelling was designated by the painted board that had once graced it, but now played the part of door to a dilapidated pig-sty. Again, another volume folded down the chimney, for so the orifice was termed, under which the good-tempered and rosy Nelly Clarey was endeavouring to kindle a fire, with wet boughs and crumbling turf. The maid of the inn knelt before the unmanageable combustibles, fanning the flickering flame with her apron, or puffing it with her breath; the bellows, it is true, lay at her side, but it was bereft of nose and handle. “Poor thing,” she said, compassionately, “it wasn't in it's nature to last for ever; and sure, master's grandmother bought it as good as thirty years ago, at the fair of Clonmel, as a curiosity, more nor anything else, as I heard say.”

“Are you sure,” interrogated the young lady, after patiently submitting to be smoked-dried for many minutes – “are you sure that the flue is clear?”

“Is it clear, my lady! Why, then, bad cess to me for not thinking of that before! – sure I've good right to remember thim devils o’ crows making their nesteens in the chimbley; and it's only when the likes o’ you and yer honourable father stop at the inn, that we light a fire in this place at all.”