toil and trouble; but Sir Murtagh took me up short with his old proverb,
"learning is better than house or land." Out of forty-nine suits which
he had, he never lost one but seventeen;[J] the rest he gained with
costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but even that did not pay.
He was a very learned man in the law, and had the character of it; but
how it was I can't tell, these suits that he carried cost him a power of
money; in the end he sold some hundreds a year of the family estate; but
he was a very learned man in the law, and I know nothing of the matter,
except having a great regard for the family; and I could not help
grieving when he sent me to post up notices of the sale of the
fee-simple of the lands and appurtenances of Timoleague. "I know, honest
Thady," says he, to comfort me, "what I'm about better than you do; I'm
only selling to get the ready money wanting to carry on my suit with
spirit with the Nugents of Carrickashaughlin."

He was very sanguine about that suit with the Nugents of
Carrickashaughlin. He could have gained it, they say, for certain, had
it pleased Heaven to have spared him to us, and it would have been at
the least a plump two thousand a-year in his way; but things were
ordered otherwise, for the best to be sure. He dug up a fairy-mount[2]
against my advice, and had no luck afterwards. Though a learned man in
the law, he was a little too incredulous in other matters. I warned him
that I heard the very Banshee[3] that my grandfather heard under Sir
Patrick's window a few days before his death. But Sir Murtagh thought
nothing of the Banshee, nor of his cough, with a spitting of blood,
brought on, I understand, by catching cold in attending the courts, and
overstraining his chest with making himself heard in one of his
favourite causes. He was a great speaker with a powerful voice; but his
last speech was not in the courts at all. He and my lady, though both of
the same way of thinking in some things, and though she was as good a