COUNTY OF GALWAY.
(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

Source: Irish Times, Saturday, October 22, 1859

ATHENRY – the seat of the Kings of Old Connaught, and now of Railway celebrity, has been the scene of an incident which some of our modern novelists would have spun into a 500 page volume, but which I give in as few words as possible.

A widow, “fat, fair, and forty,” kept here an eating house, and was well to do. She had some lodgers, and among the rest, one some years her junior, on whom the widow “cast a wishful eye.” The day on which the seemingly much attached pair were to enter the conjugal state had been fixed as November day next.

In the meantime the widow’s daughter, who had for the last twelve months been in England, returned a fortnight ago, and is a fine specimen of girlhood 18 years of age, and began to throw “sheep’s eyes” at her mother’s affianced suitor and met with a hearty return; for he in the case of age appropriated to himself the advantage “of two evils always choose the least.” The widow, in happy anticipations of future bliss went two days ago to Galway for goods, to replenish her little store and returned yesterday, finding her house cared by a neighbour, and on inquiry and search, found herself minus, the suitor, daughter and £25. They decamped in her absence; and she, poor woman is quite indignant and no small blame to her.