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the people on the ground, gentle and simple, high and low, rich and poor. The ould gentlemen were the gentlemen after all, saving your honour's presence. They'd swear at a body a little, to be sure, and, may be, give one a cut of a whip now and then, but we were no losers by it in the end;—and they were so easy and civil, and kept such rattling houses and thousands of welcomes; and there was no grinding for rent, and few agents; and there was hardly a tenant on the estate that did not taste of his landlord's bounty often and often in the year;—but now it's another thing; no matter for that, sir, for I'd better br telling you my story.
'Well, we had everything of the best, and plenty of it; and we ate, and we drank, and we danced, and the young master by the same token danced with Peggy Batry, from the Bothereen—a lovely young couple they were, though they are both long enough now. To make a long story short, I got, as a body may say; the same thing as tipsy almost, for I can't remember ever at all, no ways, how I left the place; only I did leave it that's certain. Well, I thought, for all that, in myself, I'd just step to Molly Cronohan's, the fairy woman, to speak word about the bracket heifer that was bewitched; and so as I was crossing the stepping stones at the ford' of Ballyashenogh, and was looking up at the stars
