And Mr. Evans' reaping-hook nose had sniffed assent.

Yet, though Judith was averted, the Christmas holidays always held the menace of brothers to be reckoned with as rival claimants for Harry.

"The boys, darling!" "Unselfishness, darling!" "After the holidays, my child!"

Lady Isabel was of the school that inculcated self-denial for its daughters, but never for its sons; (whether from a belief that such was inherent in the male sex, or from a fear that the effort would be misplaced, it is difficult to say). Christian was ever quick to respond to the call for martyrdom, but that the Twins should both maltreat and despise the venerable Harry, added a poignancy to renunciation that placed it almost beyond attainment. On this day of festival, happily, renunciation was not exacted; other attractions had absorbed the Twins, and Christian's rights were unchallenged.

Therefore, it was that the youngest Miss Talbot-Lowry, perched on old Harry's broad back, and looking of about the same size in relation to it as the "Wran" to the holly-bush, was now blissfully discussing hound-puppies with her trusted friend, Father David, and was asking nothing more that life could offer.

Dr. Mangan, meantime, waited, with a permissive smile, for the moment to make his "little girl" known to the young ladies from Mount Music, and to their cousin, young Larry Coppinger. He was in no hurry, and he had often had occasion to agree with Milton (though he had been quite unaware of so doing) in thinking that they also serve who only stand and wait.



CHAPTER VIII

It may be permissible to introduce a meet of hounds at or about the end of a chapter, but I feel sure that the ensuing run must be given elbow-room. Alarming to many though this statement may be, yet it may be said that its foundations are laid in truth and equity, and in the necessities of this history may be found the justification of the chapter.

The Quarry Wood had not failed. Larry's fox had been in it. To Larry, seated on his stout, bay cob, with a heart banging against his ribs, and a soul absorbed into a single supplication, had come, suddenly and beautifully, the answer to prayer, the ineffable spectacle of a large and lovely fox, sliding quietly away, at the right place, at the right moment. Life could offer Larry no more; not then, at all events.

"My coverts—my fox!"

Not many boys of sixteen, enthusiasts, endowed with just that touch of the poetic temperament that can set the brain reeling, could know a more wondrous moment.

Then to see Cousin Dick, blazing and splendid, charging out of the wood, "like the man on the red horse in Revelation," as Christian said afterwards—(Christian had sneaked away from Charles, the coachman, and had followed Larry)—with the hounds flashing around and ahead of him, and Cottingham's rasping "Forrad! Forrad!" from the wood behind, like the blast of a bellows upon flames!

Larry had been past speech when that apocalyptic vision had materialised in response to his halloa. He had waved his hat and cheered the hounds to the line of the fox, but it had been unnecessary; they had not had an instant's uncertainty, and had taken hold on their own account without reference to anyone.

That the hold taken by the hounds was a firm and assured one was due, not only to their own virtues, but also to the fact that where the fox had broken, a tract of turf bog met the wood, and carried a scent of entire efficiency. What, however, it was incapable of carrying were the horses. The hounds, uttering their ecstasy in that gorgeous chorus of harmonious discordance called Full Cry, sped across the bog like a flock of seagulls; but for the riders, a narrow track between deep ditches left by the turf-cutters for their carts, was the sole hope, and a string of horses, galloping in single file, was soon following hard on the heels of the Master. Foremost of them all were Christian and Larry, filled with an elation beyond the power of words to convey. The hounds were holding steadily right-handed across the bog, and were ever widening the distance between them and the riders, but it was enough for these two children to be able to keep their proud place, next after the Master, and to know that no one, not even Cottingham, could deprive them of it. It may gravely be questioned if Tommy, the stout bay cob, and Harry, the residue of a hunt horse, appreciated a position to which they were so little accustomed. Harry, whose heart, indisputably in the right place, was possibly the only sound item in his outfit, pounded gallantly on, roaring as he went, like a lion seeking after his prey; but Tommy, whose labours were, as a rule, limited to mild harness-work, was kept going mainly by stress of circumstances, in which category Larry's spurs took a prominent part. The bog-track at length became merged in a rushy field, and then indeed did the pent waters of the hunt break forth. Major Dick's tall chestnut had gradually increased his lead, and by the time the track was clear of riders, he was two fields ahead, with Cottingham not far behind, and a few indignant young men riding like maniacs to overtake them. To have been held back by a schoolboy and a little girl is an indignity not easily to be borne. The Broadwater Vale field was a hard-going one, including a strengthening of young soldiers from the regiment quartered at Riverstown, and it was not long before Tommy and Harry were beginning to find themselves in a more familiar and less exigent position. Judith, on the grey mare, went by them like a flash; Doctor Mangan overtook them heavily, and heavily passed them. Father David, riding a little wide of the crowd, waved a friendly hand to Christian, as the black mare, composed and discreet, as became a daughter of the Church, dwelt for an instant on the top of a wide bank, before she struck off into the next field. Worst indignity of all, Charles, the coachman, on the elderly carriage horse, drew alongside, and presumed to offer directions and admonitions. "As if," thought Christian, as she drove Harry at the bank in the wake of the black mare, "I cared a pin what he says!"

Gone for poor Charles were the days when Miss Christian had revered him above all other created things; days such as the one on which, after a ride round the yard on an unharnessed carriage horse, Christian, in gratitude too great for words, had attempted to kiss him. Charles had repelled the embrace, saying tactfully: "No pleasures in Lent, Miss!" and Christian had accepted the excuse. Then Miss Christian had been three years old, now she was thirteen, and Charles had, in the interval, married a cook, and lost his figure, and with it, had departed his nerve, and the reverance of Miss Christian, and he knew it.

Close behind Charles came Dr. Mangan's "little girl," who had been confided with a lubricating half-crown, to his care. Miss Letitia Mangan was far from considering herself a little girl. She was sixteen and a half, and conceived herself to be of combatant rank, even though her thick, dark hair banged on her back in a ponderous pigtail, and her education at the Cluhir Convent School was still uncompleted. The fat, piebald pony that she was riding would have a sore back before she got home. Christian, perched wren-like on her ancient steed (but a wren placed with mathematical accuracy of directness with relation to the steed's ears), noted with disfavour the crooked seat, the heavy hand on the curb. Larry, hot and pink, with hat hanging by its guard, his fair hair looking like storm-tossed corn-stooks, noted nothing, being wholly engrossed in bitter conflict with Tommy. The art of keeping a good start with hounds is not given to many, and least of all to the young and inexperienced. From having been first of the first, it had fallen to Larry and Christian to find themselves last, and last in the despised company of Charles and "the Mangan girl."

The unexacting position of being at the heel of the hunt may have a charm for the philosophic or unambitious, but so black a continuation of so great a start was a trial quite beyond the endurance of a young gentleman possessed of the artistic temperament. And then the abominable Mangan girl came into play, and joined in the circling performance at the big bank. Always, when Larry felt that this time the cob was going to "have it," that cow-like red and white beast would jam itself in the way, so he thought, raging. In this matter of hunting, Dr. Mangan had not been well advised in his scheme for his little girl's social advantage.

In the meantime the hounds had run their fox into Drumkeen Wood, and the riders, arriving in small and breathless companies, thanked God for a check, and tightened their girths and took courage. The latter would undoubtedly be needed if the run continued; Drumkeen Wood was hung like a cloak upon the side of a steep hill, and was the invariable prelude to the worst going within the bounds of the hunt.

"If he's into the big earth here, I'm afraid it's good-bye to him!" said Dr. Mangan, taking courage in a liquid form. "It was a sweet gallop while it lasted! Sweet and short, like this toothful of cherry brandy I'm after drinking!"

"Ah, that's poor stuff, Doctor," said Mr. Hallinan, proprietor of Hallinan's Hotel, a prosperous hostelry, much patronised by salmon-fishers. "Give me a sup of good old John Jameson in its purity!"

"'Twas for Tishy I brought this out," replied the Doctor, apologetically; "but I lost sight of her. She's back somewhere with little Christian Lowry and young Coppinger."

"What sort of a lad is that?" asked Mr. Hallinan. "Is he as big a pup as them young Lowrys?"

"Ah, they're not so bad altogether," said Dr. Mangan, indulgently. "Young sprigs like them are none the worse for a little tashpy, as the people say!" The Doctor's heavy voice relaxed a little over the world tashpy (which, it should perhaps be explained, is Irish, and implies a blend of impudence and high spirits). He was quite aware that his friend Hallinan and he regarded the Talbot-Lowrys from a different standpoint.

"I was having a bit of lunch there the other day," he went on, "and I thought they were nice boys enough."

"I hope you got enough to eat!" said Mr. Hallinan, disagreeably; "I'm told that their butcher's sick and tired trying to get what he's owed, out of them! There should be drink enough, anyway! I'm just after sending in a case of whisky there. God knows when I'll be ped for it!"

At this moment the two gentlemen, whose horses were nibbling the grass of the bank that surrounded the wood, were shaken by the sudden appearance of the white nose of the Master's chestnut on the other side of the bank.

"I'd be obliged if there was less noise!" said the Master's voice, with threatening in it.

Mr. Hallinan's jaw dropped unaffectedly.

"Merciful God!" he murmured; "did he hear me, d'ye think?"

"Ah, no fear, man!" whispered the Doctor, encouragingly. "And if he did itself, maybe you'd get your cheque a bit quicker!"

In the silence that followed, a whimpering whistle from a hound, invisible, yet near at hand, sent a thrill through the waiting riders. There followed the rustling rush of hounds through the undergrowth, as they gathered to enquire into the whimper. Then another whimper, merging into a squeal, and Cottingham's voice:

"Hark to Dulcet! Forrad to Dulcet!"

"Begad, they have him again," said Dr. Mangan, without enthusiasm. "I wonder where is Tishy gone to? I suppose they'll run these blasted hills now—"

The big grey horse, and his seventeen stone rider, moved off in the opposite direction to the tread of the hunt, which was slowly and steadily pushing upwards through the wood. Dr. Mangan was one of the select company of followers of hounds who know when they have had enough.

A narrow, stony passage, more resembling a drain than a lane, ran round the wood; the riders hustled along it, like a train in a cutting, too tightly packed for the most vindictive kicker to injure his neighbour, too hampered by impeding rocks to make more speed than can be accomplished by a jog. The drain ended at a V-shaped fissure between two slants of rock, and, by the time the last horse had clattered and scrambled up it, the hounds were away again, steering up, across heathery fields, enclosed by fences and stone walls of all sorts and sizes, for a great double-headed hill on the sky-line, three or more miles away.

"Carrigaholt as usual!" said Major Dick, over his shoulder, to the Hon. Sec., young Kirby of Castle Ire. "If you get a chance, try and head him off the western rocks—and Bill! Tell those infernal children of mine they're to keep with Charles and look out for bogs!"

His conscience as a parent thus appeased, the Master applied himself to the no small task of keeping his hounds in sight, and of evading the equal difficulties presented by rocks and bog holes. The offspring in question were now, with Larry, in comparative and undesired safety beneath the fluttering wing of Charles, and Bill Kirby, having faithfully delivered his message, found himself immediately adopted as an alternative protector, and repented him of his fidelity.

The hounds stormed on through the hills, running hard across the frequent boggy tracts, more slowly, and with searchings, over the intervening humps of rock and furze. The fox was making a well-known point, and running a well-known line, but the fences in their infinite variety, defied the staling force of custom, and the difficulties of the going were intensified by the pace. The hounds gained at length the ridge of the high country, and as they flitted along the skyline, the riders, labouring among the rocks, skirting the bogs, pounding at the best pace they could raise over the intervals of heather and grass, felt that their hold on the hunt had become distinctly insecure.

"'Christian dost thou see them?'" quoted Larry, kicking his heels into the bay cob's well-covered ribs without effect, "for I don't!"

"They'll check at Carrigaholt," called back Bill Kirby; "that'll be our chance—"

They were far up on the slope of the hills now; the country swung in long, dipping lines, down to the Vale of the Broadwater, and spread, in great and generous curves, away to the far range of the Mweelin Mountains, that brooded, in colour a deep and sullen sapphire, on the horizon. The town of Cluhir, a little puff of smoke, cut in two by the wide river, lay below. The spires of the two churches rose above the smoke, one on either side of the bridge that spanned the river. The sound of bells, faintly rising from one of them, summoned the faithful to the mid-day Mass in honour of St. Stephen.

Larry, pushing Tommy along at a dogged canter, lifted his bowler hat as he heard the bells, and Christian and Judith looked at each other. The tradition of the Protestant, "No demonstrations!" with its singular suspicion and distrust of manifestations of reverence or poetry, had been early implanted in them, and Judith murmured to Christian: "How on earth does he remember?"

"I know I couldn't," admitted Christian; yet some feeling that, though crushed, had survived the heavy feet of Lady Isabel's trusted manuals, stirred in her in accord with the faint clash of the chapel bells, making her envy Larry his accredited salutation, making her feel something of the beauty, if not of holiness, of, at least, the recognition that there were holy things in the world.

On the nearer head of Carrigaholt the check, predicted by Bill Kirby, came. A narrow and level plateau ran between the twin crests; above it on both sides, rose successive shelves of cliff, with swathes of russet bracken muffling their fierce outline. Flung about on the shelves, looking like tumbled piles of giant books in a neglected library, were immense rectangular rocks; one would say that only the grey and knotted cords of the ivy that had crept over them, held them in their place upon those rugged shelves. At one end of the level place the ground fell steeply to a wild stream, the Feorish, from whose farther bank another hill, but little less formidable than Carrigaholt, rose like an enemy tower, threatening its defences. The hounds swarmed like bees among the rocks, jumping or falling from shelf to shelf, burrowing and thrusting through the bracken, their heads appearing suddenly in quite improbable places, with glowing eyes and glistening pink tongues, demanding from their huntsman the information that no one but themselves could give.

It was a place in which not one, but a hundred places of safety presented themselves to a fox, but this good fox had despised them all, and, of all the hounds, it was Amazon, Christian's beloved foundling, who was first to recognise the fact. Far down, from the bottom of the gorge, she called to her fellows, and it was Christian, of all the riders, who first heard her voice. If Larry had had his great moment, when the fox broke, it was Christian's turn now, when Amazon fresh-found him. I suppose there are not very many people who, as well as being perfectly happy, are conscious of their perfect happiness. This little girl was of that privileged company, as, in answer to her call, her father threw the pack over the edge of the plateau and cheered them to Amazon.

In two minutes, a frenzied chorus was filling the narrow gorge, the cry of the hounds, the hurrying reiterated notes of the horn, the shouts of the Whips rating on stragglers, echoing and re-echoing from cliff to cliff. Before the riders had committed themselves to the descent, the leading hounds were straining up the opposite cliff face; slithering, and slipping, the horses were hurried down a track that goats had made between rocks and bracken, and, at the base, found themselves confronted with the problem of the river. The River Styx could hardly look less attractive than did the Feorish, as it swirled, swollen and foaming, among its rocks, its dark torrent plunging from steep to steep in roaring waterfalls. Some country men, high on the cliffs, howled directions, and the Master, his eye on his hounds struggling with the fierce stream, went on down the gorge until the howls changed their metre, thus indicating to the experienced that the moment had come to cross the river. The ford, such as it was, permitted some half dozen of the horses to cross it, splashing and floundering, wobbling perilously from the round and slimy back of one sunken rock to another.

Judith and the grey mare, following close on Bill Kirby's heels, got over neatly, and were away after him over the top of the hill before Christian's turn came. The ancient and skilled Harry addressed himself to the task with elderly caution, feeling his way with suspicion, creeping across with slow-poised feet, and was so delicate over the effort, that Larry's cob, following too close on him, was checked at a critical moment. He struggled, slipped, recovered, found himself still hindered by Harry, and, with a final stagger, lost footing altogether, and rolled over.

Cottingham, subsequently recounting the incident, declared that he thought, he did, that the young genel'm was done for; but "that little Miss Christeen—she's a nummer she is!—she off'n 'er 'oss before I fair sees what's 'appened, and she ketches the young chap by the 'ed, and pulls 'im clear! Her did indeed! A lill' gurl like what she is too! Her's wuth more than ten big men!"

What a singular encomium, "a nummer" might mean, was a fact known only to Cottingham, but it was incontrovertibly Christian's eel-like swiftness of action that had saved Larry from a worse accident. Small and slender though she was, she was wiry, and she had the gift of being able instantly to concentrate every force of mind and body upon a desired point—a rare gift and a precious one.

But when she and Larry, dripping and hatless, were hauled into safety by other helpers, less swift but more powerful, it was found that Larry had not come out of the Feorish unscathed. His left hand was hanging, helpless, with a broken wrist.



CHAPTER IX

The hunt swept on after the manner of hunts, full of sympathy, having, as to one man, contributed a silver cigarette case, with which another, a resourceful medical student, had improvised a splint, but feeling, not without relief, that they could do nothing more; feeling also, with depression, that the Lord only knew where the devils had run to by this time, but that that couldn't be helped; with which philosophic reflection and many valedictory shouts of commiseration, the last of them had vanished over the hill.

The unfortunate Charles restored to guardianship, now found himself with Miss Judith, lost; Miss Christian soaked to the skin, eight miles or more from her home; Master Larry ditto, in much pain, no nearer to his, and unable to mount his horse, which latter would have to be led over a succession of fences to the nearest road; (and no matter with what distinction an elderly coachman can drive a pair of horses on a road, it is very far from being the same thing to get a pair of horses across a country). It was, therefore, a very gloomy party that set face for the nearest highway. The intricacies of procedure at each jump need not here be dealt with, but it may be said that a more thankful man than Charles, when he again felt the good macadam under his feet, is not often met with. He would at that moment have said that he could not have felt an intenser gratitude than suffused him as he saw his convoy safe off the hills; but there he would have over-stated the case, since, scarcely five minutes after the road had been reached, an even more supreme thankfulness was his. Coming rapidly towards him, he beheld Dr. Mangan's outside car, and upon it was the large person of Dr. Mangan himself.

"Well," said Charles that evening, to Mr. Evans, "if it was the Angel Gabriel I seen flying down to me, I wouldn't be as glad as what I was when I seen the Big Doctor on the side-car!"

And Mr. Evans had caustically rejoined: "It'll be the funny day when you'll see wings on him!" meaning Dr. Mangan, of whom he had a low opinion.

Wings or no wings, no angel of mercy and succour was ever more welcome or more needed than was the Big Doctor at this moment. Larry, very white, shivering with pain and cold, was lifted on to the car; Christian was told to gallop away home as fast as she could, and Charles was directed to let Miss Coppinger know that her nephew would be put up for the night at the Doctor's own house at Cluhir.

"You can say to her that I met the Hunt, and one of them told me what happened," said the Big Doctor, "and I knew then what to do."

It might, indeed, habitually be said of Dr. Mangan that he knew very well what to do. There were, indeed, but two occasions on record when it might have seemed that he had not so known. The first of these was when he had abandoned an improving practice in Dublin to work as his father's partner in his native Cluhir, the second, when, preliminary to that return, he had married a lady, alleged, by inventive and disagreeable people, to have been his cook. The disagreeable people had also said disagreeable things as to the nature of the stress that had prompted the marriage. But it was now twenty years since the Mangans had been established at Number Six, The Mall, Cluhir; the Doctor had come in for his father's money as well as his practice, and was respected as "a warm man"; the disagreeable ones had grown old, and people who are both old and disagreeable cannot expect to command a large audience. Mrs. Mangan, on the contrary, was neither the one nor the other, being, at this time, but little over forty, and as kindly, lazy, and handsome a creature as ever lived down spiteful gossip by good-nature. When "The Dawkthor" (as she called him, with a drowsy drag on the first syllable) had galloped in at one o'clock to command Barty's room to be got ready at once, Mrs. Mangan was still in what she called "dishable," and was straying between her bedroom and the kitchen, pleasurably involved in the cares of both.

"They say young Coppinger fell in the river, and he's broken his wrist," said the Doctor rapidly, stamping into his wife's room, bringing the wind of the hills with him. "I'll bring him here as soon as I can get hold of him."

"The creature!" replied Mrs. Mangan, sympathetically.

"Well, don't be waiting to pity him now!" said her husband, stuffing bandages into his pocket, "but hurry and put hot jars into the bed—and clean sheets. Don't forget now, Annie!"

He lumbered in his long boots and spurs, down to the surgery, still issuing directions.

"Tishy'll be back directly—she'll give you a hand—and Annie! tell Hannah to have some hot soup ready. Now, hurry, for God's sake!"

The front door into the Mall, Cluhir's most fashionable quarter, banged.

"Well, well!" said Mrs. Mangan, still sympathetic, while she removed the curling-pins from her bison fringe; "wasn't it the will of God that I had a headache this morning and couldn't go to Mass! I'll have something to say to Father Greer now if he draws it up to me that I was backward in my duty!"

Much fortified by this reflection, Mrs. Mangan hurriedly proceeded with her toilette, squalling meanwhile to her bench-woman in the kitchen a summary of the Doctor's orders. She had no more than achieved what she called her "Sunday dress," a complimentary effort to be equally divided between Saint Stephen and young Mr. Coppinger, when the back-door into the yard from the house slammed, and her daughter's voice announced her return.

"Come up, Tishy, till I talk to you!" shouted Mrs. Mangan, slinging a long gold watch-chain over her head and festooning it upon her ample bosom: "Did you meet Pappy?" she continued, as her daughter's steps drew near.

"I did to be sure," returned Miss Letitia, coming into her mother's room and flinging herself into an armchair, "when I was crossing the bridge it was. He roared to me to hurry you and Hannah. Holy Mary Joseph! How stiff I am! That old horn on the saddle has the right leg cut off me!"

"Well, never mind your legs now," replied Mrs. Mangan, peremptorily, "what I want to know is what sort is this young man that Pappy's bringing in on top of us? In God's name, why couldn't he be let go home to his own?"

"'Young man' is it!" retorted Tishy; "he's nothing but a boy at school, and a cross boy too! Such beating of his pony as he had when he wouldn't jump for him! Didn't I try and make poor Zoe go before him, and th' eye he cast at her! I thought he'd beat me, too!"

"Oh, and is a boy all he is then?" said Mrs. Mangan, with relief in her voice: "you'd think by the work your father had 'twas the Lord Leftenant was in it! Run away now, Tishy, like a good girl, and get those clothes off you, and help Hannah with Barty's room. Boy or man or whatever he is, he must have a bed under him!"

It was a very deplorable boy who presently arrived at No. 6, The Mall, Cluhir, and was practically lifted off the car by the Big Doctor. Francis Aloysius Mangan had many aspects of character of an undesirable kind, but they were linked with one virtue, the Irish gift, of a good-natured heart. With his enormous thick hands, that made Larry think of a tiger's paws, he undressed the boy as cleverly and gently as he had set the broken bones of his wrist. Mrs. Mangan and Hannah had not failed; the soup and the jars were, as the latter authority had pronounced, "as hot as love," similarly passioned was the ardour of the whisky-punch, with which the proceedings had opened. Combined with a subsequent sleeping-draught, it conferred the boon of sleep, and for some hours, at all events, Larry forgot his recently-acquired knowledge of what pain was. But not for many hours. In the long darkness of the winter morning he lay with a fast mounting temperature, while he made the discovery, common to all in his case, that upon the particular bone that has been broken, the entire existence pivots. And, in addition to the broken bone, by the time that Miss Frederica had driven in from Coppinger's Court, there was but little doubt that what Dr. Mangan called, lightly, "a touch of pneumonia," would keep young Mr. Coppinger in Barty's room for a time unspecified.

Miss Frederica drove home again in a seriously perturbed frame of mind, and with indignation against the decrees of Providence hot within her.

"I wired for a nurse for him!" she said to Lady Isabel, "I could not plant myself upon them! It's all most uncomfortable and unavoidable. Of course they've been extremely kind—"

At the back of Miss Coppinger's mind was the wish, that she trampled on whenever it stirred, that the Mangans had been less unexceptionally kind and Good Samaritan-like. "Such an obligation!" she groaned; "they've turned their own son out of the house to make room for Larry! But oh, my dear Isabel, if you could imagine what the house is like! The untidiness! The dirt! Of course they're unspeakably kind, and Dr. Mangan is certainly very clever, and has managed Larry wonderfully," went on Frederica, repenting her of her evil speaking, "and I must say I can't help liking Mrs. Mangan, but the girl—!" Miss Coppinger shut her mouth so tightly that her lips became thin, white lines. "Keep the door of your lips" was a text which she had in her youth illuminated for herself. She often found that nothing save a sudden and violent slam would keep that door shut, and, to do her justice, the slams, when the conversation turned on the Mangan household, were both frequent and violent.

This was later, when Larry was getting better, and when his aunt had begun to find the daily drive to Cluhir something of a strain. It was not until he was practically convalescent that he was permitted to receive other visitors. Even the daughter of the house, and that unknown son, into whose bedroom he had been thrust, were, for him, beneath the surface, and their presence only inferential. Barty was domiciled at a friend's, and Miss Tishy held aloof, the hushed voices, and general restraint imposed by illness, being not at all to her taste. Lady Isabel came once, with his aunt, and Christian crept shyly in behind them. Christian was wont to be silent in the presence of her elders. That great and admirable maxim, once widely instilled into the young, whose purport is that children should seldom be seen and never heard, had early been accepted by Christian, without resentment, even, as she grew older, with gratitude. Having diffidently taken Larry's listless and pallid paw, she had slipped into the background, and waited silently, while her eager brain absorbed and stored every detail for future meditation. Long after Larry had lightly forgotten all save the large facts of his illness and incarceration, Christian could describe the Pope, whose highly-coloured presentment beatified (rather than beautified) the wall over Larry's bed, and could imitate, with the accuracy of a phonograph, the voice of Mrs. Mangan, as she issued her opinions on the state of the weather to her distinguished visitors.



CHAPTER X

The "touch of pneumonia," prophesied by Dr. Mangan, had proved to be a sufficiently emphatic one. Larry's recovery was slow, and during his languid convalescence, he found himself becoming sincerely attached to the Big Doctor and Mrs. Mangan, and their high place in his affections was shared by the nurse provided by Miss Coppinger. The bond of a common faith was one that, at this stage of his development, had but little appeal to Larry, but he was, at all events, spared any possibility of suffering from the feelings of sub-friction, if not of antagonism, that inevitably stirred in his aunt's breast, if she found herself brought into relation closer than that of employer and employed with those of the older creed.

His sense of beauty, now beginning to acquire consciousness, and sorely afflicted by the decorative scheme that had been adopted in Barty's bedroom, found solace in the faces of these two women. Even the lazy consideration of the contrast between their types, was a comfort to Larry, and distracted his mind from the wall-paper (which suggested the contents of Dr. Mangan's surgery, rhubarb, and mustard-leaves predominating), and from Barty's taste in art, which in its sacred and profane aspects was alike deplorable.

Nurse Brennan, slight and fair, with the clearest of blue eyes, and a Dresden china complexion—Larry was already artist enough to study and adore the shadow of her white coif, with its subtle, reflected lights, on her pink, rose-leaf cheek—and Mrs. Mangan, just a little over-blown, but heavily, darkly handsome, with deep-lidded shadowy eyes, and—as Master Coppinger pleased himself by discovering—a slight suggestion of a luxurious Chesterfield sofa, upholstered in rich cream velvet. When he was getting better, and the rigours of the sick room were relaxing, these two provided him with interest and entertainment of which they were delightfully unaware.

"Well, and what will I give him for his dinner to-day, Norrse?"—(impossible to persuade the English alphabet to disclose Mrs. Mangan's pronunciation of this word)—his hostess would say, drifting largely into Larry's room, and seating herself on the side of his bed.

"Don't be making an invalid of him at all, Mrs. Mangan!" Nurse Brennan would rejoin briskly; "I'm just telling him I'd be sorry to get a thump from that old wrist of his, he and the Doctor think so much about! And he hasn't as much as a point of temperature those three days!"

"Oh, I say, Nurse!" Larry would protest, "then why won't you let me get up?"

"Be quite now"—(in Ireland the "e" in "quiet" is not infrequently thus transposed)—"and don't be bothering me, like a good child!" Nurse would reply, with a sidelong flash of her charming eyes, a recognition of Larry's age and sex that atoned for the opprobrious epithet.

"Would he like a bit of fish now? I'm going down the town, and I might meet one of the women in from Broadhaven." Thus Mrs. Mangan, coaxingly.

"Oh, Mrs. Mangan, please don't bother!" says Larry.

"Ah, no bother at all! Sure I was going down anyway to the chapel to get a sup of holy water. I declare the house is bone dry! Not a drop in it!"

After dreary winter mornings spent in reading, by the light of a misplaced window, or age-long afternoons, drowsed through in that torpor, mental as well as physical, that overwhelms the victim of a prolonged sojourn in bed, Larry used to find himself looking forward to the conversations between Nurse Brennan and Mrs. Mangan that arose at tea-time, and followed, stimulated by the early darkness of January, in the firelight; the southern voices rising and falling like the flickering flames, becoming soon self-engrossed, and forgetful of the silent listener in the bed. Sometimes sleep would lap him in slow, stealthy peace, and the voices would die away, or come intermittently, as the sound of a band marching through a town fades and recurs at the end of a street. But without being aware of it, he was absorbing knowledge, learning a new point of view, breathing a new atmosphere that was to influence him more deeply than he could have any conception was possible.

One evening the talk fell on the congenial topic of illness, doctors and patients, nurses and nuns, all spinning in the many-coloured whirlpool of talk, now one and now another cresting the changing wave. The fact that Larry was of their own religion, counterbalanced his belonging to an alien class, and if their consciences sometimes hinted at a lack of discretion, they quieted them with the assurance that "the poor child was asleep!"

"Ah, the nuns are wonderful!" said Mrs. Mangan, languishingly. "Look how lovely they have the Workhouse Infirmary! I was taking some flowers to Reverend Mother, and she was telling me what a beautiful death old Catherine Macsweeny made. Reverend Mother rained tears when she told me."

Nurse Brennan sniffed.

"Reverend Mother's a sweet woman, and the nuns are very attentive when a person'd be dying, but indeed Mrs. Mangan, if you ask me, I'd say 'twas the only time they were much use to their patients! Up at that infirmary what have patients at night to look after them only an old inmate, and she 'wanting' maybe!"

Larry began to giggle, and was moved to try his wit.

"Nurse! What's the difference between a stale mate and an old inmate? And what does it want?"

"It wants the very same as yourself—brains!" returned Nurse, swiftly. "Now may be!" She wagged her head at him triumphantly, turning aside to hide the smile of victory, and Larry thought how lovely was her profile, as the firelight etched it in incandescent lines on the smoky background.

"Well, indeed, the Poor have a deal to put up with!" said Mrs. Mangan, lazily, leaning back in her basket-chair, with her big grey cat purring like an aeroplane engine on her knee. "The Doctor says no one but himself knows the way he's dragged all over the country, patching up after some of them young fellows that get dispensaries before they're fit to doctor the cat!"

The reformer, that underlay the artist in Larry, awoke.

"But, Mrs. Mangan," he said, hotly, sitting up in bed, and glaring into the gloom at Mrs. Mangan's half-seen face, "why do they give dispensaries to chaps that can't doctor a cat?"

"Because their fathers can spend four or five hundred pounds to buy votes!" returned Mrs. Mangan, laughing at him. "Is that news to you? Lie down child, and don't be looking at me like that! I haven't a vote to sell!"

Larry subsided with vague splutterings. Nurse came to his bedside and smoothed the clothes.

"Listen to me now," she said impressively, "and I'll tell you something to make you angry, if you like!"

She leaned against the foot of the bed, with her hands in the pockets of her apron, looking down at him. "I was in charge of th' infirmary at Mellifont one time, and late one evening a young farm-boy was brought in to me with a dislocated foot and a 'Pott's Fracture'—"

"In the name o' God, what's that?" enquired Mrs. Mangan.

"Fracture of the fibula, but the case I'm speaking of had the two bones broken at the ankle," explained Nurse Brennan, in her most professional manner; "sure I thought anyone'd know that! And I can tell you," she leaned towards Larry, striking the palm of her left hand with her little clenched right fist, as if to hammer the words into him, "I can assure you, that as bad as you thought you were, you don't know what pain is beside what that boy suffered! Well, I sent for the doctor—a young brat of a fella that hadn't but just left college. 'He'll want an anaesthetic,' says he, 'I'll send down for Doctor ——' (I'll not tell you his name—Smith, I'll call him!) 'Do you give him some brandy, nurse,' says he, 'Dr. Smith'll be here soon.' Sure enough he was, and glad I was to see him, for the patient was suffering greatly, and the leg swelling every minyute. It was a long ward he was in, and no one at all in it but himself. At the far end there was a table and a lamp, and down at the table me gentlemen sat, and commenced to talk."

Nurse Brennan paused, and Mrs. Mangan gave the fire a well-directed poke, that set the flames branching upwards. The tale was resumed, in those cool and equable tones that express a more perfected indignation than any heat or haste could convey.

"Well, that was nine o'clock, and they talked there for two hours, and I giving the patient brandy, and expecting every minyute he'd collapse. And what do you suppose they were talking about? Fighting they were! Disputing which of them would perform the operation, and which would administer the chloroform!"

Mrs. Mangan laughed lightly, and said: "I wouldn't at all doubt it!"

"Impossible!" exclaimed Larry.

"Not a bit impossible!" said Nurse Brennan, "and how d'ye think they settled it in the end? They arranged one of them would begin th' operation and go on for five minutes, and then he should stop and give the anaesthetic, and the other would go on with the leg! Oh, it's the case, I assure you! It was twelve o'clock at night before they were done!"

She paused, laughing a little at the hot questions with which Larry assailed her, but he could see the unshed tears gleaming in her eyes. "I was summoned to a private case next day; I don't know what happened to the unfortunate poor creature of a patient."

"A stiff leg he has, I'll be bound!" said Mrs. Mangan.

Larry lay silent. He saw it all. The long, dark ward, the white angel figure (he thought, romantically) bending over the tortured creature on the bed, and, far away, the pool of yellow light and in it those two—he sought in vain for adjectives to express what he thought of Dr. I'll-not-tell-you-his-name, and his young colleague.



CHAPTER XI

In the years that followed, "Larry's cads" came to be, for the young Talbot-Lowrys, a convenient designation for the friends into whose bosom Providence had seen fit to fling their cousin. But Larry never either approved or accepted it. He was entirely pleased with his new friends, and especially with that son of the house whose position he had usurped, Mr. Bartholomew Mangan.

Barty was a lengthy, languid, gentle youth, of nearly nineteen, darkly, pallidly handsome, sweet natured, and slovenly, like his mother, and, unlike her, poetical, idealistic, unpractical, shy, and self-conscious. He was, at this period, working in the office of one of the two solicitors, who, with the aid of a branch of a bank, a Petty Sessions Court, and the imposing, plate-glass bow-windows of Hallinan's hotel, enabled Cluhir to convince itself of its status as a town. Further proof of the civic importance of Cluhir was found in the existence of a debating club of very advanced political views among its young men, of which Barty Mangan was secretary. Its membership, if small, was select, since its Republican principles did not compel it to admit to its privileges shop-assistants, or artisans, while they automatically excluded members of the class that were usually referred to in the club discussions as "Carrion Crows," or if the orator's mood was mild, "the garrison." In Ireland the attitude of mind that is termed, alternately, Disloyalty or Patriotism, is largely a matter of class, and Barty Mangan's introduction of Master St. Lawrence Coppinger, as an honorary member of the club, partook of the nature of a shock to those of the faithful who were present at his first appearance in the club room, a severely plain apartment, that offered no impediment in the matter of luxury to high thinking. But the faithful of the "Sons of Emmet" Club had nothing to fear from this half-fledged young Carrion Crow. The English school to which Larry had been sent had dulled the fire lit by the poems of The Spirit of the Nation, but it had not extinguished it. It had flickered for a time, during which Hunting had superseded Patriotism, and Mr. Jorrocks had reigned alone; but the oratory of the Sons of Emmet, to which Larry was now privileged to listen, had had the effect of restoring to life and vigour the long-neglected, half-forgotten tenets of the Companionage of Finn. Larry's store of enthusiasm was quite equal to supplying motive power for running two engines; hunting still held its own, and after a club debate in which he had taken an energetic part, even the most exclusive of the Sons of Emmet admitted that Barty's importation was worthy of the privilege that had been extended to him.

A spell of cold weather had compelled a postponement of Larry's return to his own home. When snow and frost visit a country unused to their attentions, they are treated with a respect that they do not receive elsewhere. The Doctor's orders were strict, and Larry spent the last days of his stay at No. 6, The Mall, seated in semi-invalid state by the dining-room fire, occupied, mainly, in the consumption of literature provided by his new friend, Mr. Barty Mangan, that consisted of poems, books, and pamphlets of precisely that shade of politics of which his family most thoroughly disapproved, and absorbing what would be, in their opinion, the most entirely poisonous points of view.

The Big Doctor, smoking a comfortable evening pipe over the fire, would join in the discussions between his son and his visitor, offering just as much opposition to Larry's revolutionary flights as was stimulating, and flattering his sense of youth and daring.

"We mustn't send him back to his auntie too much of a rebel altogether!" The Doctor would say, grinning at the enthusiast with his pipe wedged under a tooth; "isn't it good enough for you to be a poor decent old Nationalist like myself? I'm sure there's no one would disapprove of me, is there, Annie?"

"Don't be too sure of that at all!" Mrs. Mangan would reply coquettishly, trying to look as if she did not agree with him; "wait till his auntie hears the notions Larry's taking up with, and she'll think we're all the worst in the world! And the Major! The Major'll go cracked-mad!"

"It doesn't matter where he goes!" says Larry, defiantly, "I've had these 'notions,' as you call them, for ages and ages!"

"Ah, God help you, child!" Mrs. Mangan would probably say, "keep quiet now, till I get you a glass of hot milk!"

Politics did not form the only point of contact that had been established between Larry and the Mangan household. Since his promotion to comparative convalescence, Tishy, daughter of the house, had entered more actively into his scheme of life, and the point of entrance was music. Some divergence in view as to music is more easily condoned, on both sides, than in the other realms of the spirit. It matters not from how far countries the travellers may come, or how widely sundered may be their ideals, there are rest-houses at which they can draw rein and find agreement. One of these, possibly the greatest of them, is folk song. Ireland, whose head is ever turned over her shoulder, looking to the past, has, in her folk song, at least, reason and justification for her preoccupation with what has been in her music, rather than with what is, or is to come. It is difficult to reconcile the eternal beauty of traditional Irish melody with the lack of musical interest and feeling that distinguishes the mass of modern Irish life. But, here and there, a string of the harp that has hung, mute, on Tara's walls for so many centuries, utters a sigh of sweet sound, and at Number 6, The Mall, Cluhir, the soul of music had still some power of inspiration.

This is, perhaps, a rather elaborate method of intimating that Dr. Mangan played the violin, moderately as to technique, but soundly as to intonation, and that he and his family sang, as a quartet, not only at charity concerts, but also for their own pleasure, in their own home. Music, more than the other arts, demands sympathy, and an audience. In Larry, the Mangan Quartet recognised that both requirements were supplied, together with a glorifying enthusiasm of appreciation—though this they scarcely recognised—that gilded for him their achievements, as the firelight had edged the profile of Nurse Brennan with pure gold. Larry, it has already been said, had the artistic temperament; he had also a generous heart, and he was of an age when appreciation is spontaneous, and criticism is either unborn, or is only an echo of some maturer mind. Therefore, as he lay on the Mangan blue rep-covered drawing-room sofa, with a satin cushion adorned with Tishy's conception of roses, in water-colour, under his head, while pretty Nurse Brennan gently massaged his wrist, and the Mangan Quartet warbled: "O, believe me if all those endearing young charms," or "When thro' life unblest we rove," Larry passed into ecstasy, that, had he been one degree less of a schoolboy, might have been exhaled in tears; even as the sun draws water from the sea, in a mist of glory, and returns it to the world again in rain.

Tishy was accompanist, and sang alto; her mother, who knew nothing of notation, and sang by ear, sang treble; Barty had a supple and pleasing tenor, and the Doctor possessed a solemn bass, deep and dark as a thundercloud, yet mellow as the hum of a hive of honey-bees on a summer morning; a rare voice and a beautiful one, that had its counterpart in the contralto that already, at sixteen and a half, had given Tishy power and distinction among her fellows.

At this time, Miss Letitia Mangan's views, and those of her parents, as to her future, musical or otherwise, were entirely divergent. Hers held as central figure a certain medical student, with an incipient red moustache, and a command of boxes of chocolate that was bewildering to those acquainted with his income. Quite other were Dr. Mangan's intentions with regard to his daughter, but he was satisfied to keep them out of sight; he was aware that, in all solid buildings, the deeper and farther out of sight the foundation, the more assured is the result.

It is possible that the idea of a farewell entertainment in Larry's honour emanated from the Big Doctor; if so, he had erased his tracks very thoroughly, and it was regarded by Mrs. Mangan's intimates as a final brandishing of her trophy before she was forced to relinquish it. Larry was indisputably a trophy, and Heaven was considered to have exercised a very undue discrimination in Mrs. Mangan's favour when it threw him into her house and her hands. It was a very select party, only a score or so of boys and girls, with the elders appertaining to them. Nurse Brennan had departed, taking with her Larry's young affections, and a gift, costly and superfluous, of a silver-mounted mirror, which was accompanied by some chaste lines, expressive of Master Coppinger's desire to share its privileges, whose composition had kept him happy throughout a long, wet afternoon.

The party, having opened with lemonade, tea and innumerable cakes, moved on through "a little music," (contributed exclusively by the Mangan Quartet) to games. Larry, afflicted by the discovery that he had, during his illness, outgrown his evening clothes, found himself fated to do conspicuous things in the centre of a space, cleared as for a prize-fight, in the Mangan drawing-room. Problems in connection with a ship that came from China. Exhausting efforts in guessing absurdities, that usually necessitated withdrawal to the landing outside the door with a giggling schoolgirl, and collaboration with her in a code of complicated signals. And, blackest feature of all, mistakes in any of these arduous matters entailed "forfeits," and the process entitled "paying the forfeits," meant a concentration of attention upon a young gentleman, conscious to agony of the fact that his trousers left his ankle-bones unshielded from the public gaze.

It was sufficiently distressing to lie at full length on the carpet, and declare oneself to be the length of a looby, and the breadth of a booby, but what was that as compared with sitting, blindfolded, on a chair, and guessing, among many kisses, which had been bestowed by "the girl he loved best?" As if he loved any of them! These pert and blowsy schoolgirls, with hideous voices, and arrogant curls, or crimped lion-manes of aggressive hair! He, with "his heart set all upon a snowy coif!" (as he chose to wrest Mr. Yeats' line to his own purposes).

It was singular in how many of these exercises, of which the greater number included kissing, he found himself involved with Tishy Mangan. Tishy was in a bad temper. The red-headed medical student had not been honoured with an invitation. Dr. Mangan had struck his name from the list of guests saying that they had enough without him, and Tishy knew her father too well to protest. Dr. Mangan was in the habit of saying that he always left all household affairs "in the hands of the ladies." He did not add, as he might have done, that these hands lay within his, and that their owners had long since realised that it was advisable to respond to any indication of pressure. His daughter, however, while she submitted to the inevitable, saw no reason why she should deny herself the solace of sulking, nor of avenging herself of his tyranny on "his fine pet," as she, in high indignation, described Larry to herself. Master Coppinger might be a man of property and the owner of Coppinger's Court, yes, or Dublin Castle, for all she cared! Pappy might say what he liked, but she wouldn't be bothered with a boy like that! And there was Ned Cloherty—(this was the medical student)—that she had as good as asked to come—and what could she say to him now, she wondered? So Tishy sulked, and resented the Hidden Hand, that so inevitably linked her with the owner of Coppinger's Court, as much as did that man of property himself.

The evening wore on; with romping, with screaming, with enormous consumption of various foods, and with an ever-heightening temperature, that was specially noticeable among those seniors who had not disdained the brew of punch that had coincided with the announcement of midnight, made, with maddening deliberation, by Mrs. Mangan's cuckoo-clock. The usual delirium of cracker-head-dresses had befallen the company. Larry, decorated with a dunce's cap, placed upon his yellow head by a jovial matron, found himself fated, by a final effort of penalising fancy on the part of another matron, to select "a young lady," to conduct her to the topmost step of the staircase, and there, on his knees, to kiss either her shoe-buckle or her lips; "whichever he likes best!" decreed the matron, archly.

It is strange how the reserves and reticences of childhood, the things that offend, the things that bring agony, are forgotten by so many of those who have left childhood behind. In extenuation of this lively and kindly lady, it may be said that the manners and customs of her early youth were not those to which Larry was habituated. Yet, one might have thought that a glance at Larry's face would have sufficed to induce Rhadamanthus himself to remit the penalty. Not so Mrs. Whelply, the arbitrator.

"Oh, look at the pout on him! What a naughty boy! If you don't take care, I'll put a worse task on you!"

Larry, oblivious of the dunce's cap, feeling himself in the grip of a social machine that was too strong for him, looked round upon the company. Hot, pink faces, shining eyes and teeth, Moenad hair, on all sides. Then he caught sight of Tishy's eyes, scornful and amused, regarding him as he stood irresolute, and his spirit responded to the spur of contempt. He crossed the open space of floor to where she was seated on the blue rep sofa, took off the dunce's cap with a flourish, and, with a low bow, offered her his arm.

A chorus of approval, weighted by the Big Doctor's big laugh, greeted the action. Tishy, cornered, accepted the arm, the door was swung open for them, and ostentatiously slammed behind them.

Larry, silent, and very angry, mounted the stairs quickly, and Tishy perforce, her hand gripped by his elbow, followed him. At the highest step but one, Larry stood aside, and Tishy ascended, and turning, faced him from the top. They looked at each other for a moment in silence. Both were furiously angry, resenting the compulsion that had forced them into an absurd position.

Then Tishy said insolently: "Well! Which will you have? My shoe-buckle or my lips? Take your choice!"

She poked her foot out over the edge of the step confidently.

A spark shot from Larry's angry heart to his blue eyes. He looked up at Tishy, and something suddenly masterful awoke in him. Confound her! He wouldn't have her laughing at him!

"I'll have your lips, please!" he said, mounting to the step beside her.

With schoolboy roughness he flung his arm round her shoulders. She was a little taller than he, but she did not withdraw herself; she was curiously aware that her point of view was changing. She looked for an instant in his eyes, and then she laid her lips on his.

Larry found, with surprise, that they returned the pressure of his own as he kissed her. The spark that had been in his eyes seemed to have flown to his lips, and met another spark in hers.

There was a moment of silence. Larry found himself a little out of breath, and somehow bewildered. There was more in it than he thought. He didn't quite know what to do next.

"Thank you very much," he said, stiffly, and offered his arm.

In silence they walked down the stairs again. The piano had begun, and "Sir Roger de Coverley" was being thundered forth. At the door they met the Doctor. Larry released Tishy's arm.

"If you don't mind," he said to the Doctor, "I think I'll go up to bed. I'm tired."

After he had got to his room he shook himself, much as a dog renews its vitality by shaking its ears. Then he poured some water into the basin and washed his hot face, scrubbing his lips with the sponge.

Yet, to his infinite annoyance, he seemed still to feel the pressure of Tishy's warm mouth on his.



CHAPTER XII

It is, or should be, superfluous to say that Miss Frederica Coppinger viewed with disfavour, that was the more poignant for its helplessness, Larry's adoption and assimilation by the Mangan family.

"Disastrous!" she said in a tragic voice, to the Rector of Knockceoil parish. "If he were a Protestant it wouldn't matter so much; but, as things are, for him to be thrown among these second-rate, Nationalistic, Roman Catholics—!"

The intensity of Miss Coppinger's emotions silenced him. She had indeed beaten her biggest drum, and she knew it.

The Rector, the Reverend Charles Fetherston, nodded his head with solemnity, and made a conscientious effort to remember what she was speaking of. He was not much in the habit of attending to what was said to him, finding his own thoughts more interesting than those of his parishioners. The parishioners, being aware of this peculiarity, put it down, very naturally, to eccentricity for which he was rather to be pitied than condemned, and his popularity was in no way abated by it. Mr. Fetherston was unmarried, in age about sixty; tall, stout, red-faced, of good family, a noted woodcock shot and salmon fisher, a carpenter, and an incessant pipe-smoker. These being his leading gifts, it will probably, and with accuracy, be surmised by persons conversant with the Irish Church, that he was a survival of its earliest days, when it was still an avocation suitable for gentlemen, and one in which they could indulge without any taint of professionalism being laid to their charge. He was immensely respected and admired by the poor people of the parish (none of whom were included in his small and well-to-do congregation), the fact that he was what is known as "old stock," giving him a prestige among the poorer Roman Catholics, that they would have denied to St. Peter. He shared with Major Talbot-Lowry the position of consultant in feuds, and relieving officer in distress, and, being rich, liberal, easily bored, and not particularly sympathetic to affliction, he was accustomed to stanch the flow of tears and talk alike, with a form of solace that rarely failed to meet the case, and was always acceptable. With Miss Coppinger, he felt, regretfully, that five shillings could in no way be brought to bear upon her problem, and with an effort he withdrew his mind from a new hinge that he thought of fitting to a garden-gate, and applied it to Larry.

"How old is the boy now? Sixteen last October? He doesn't look as much—you'll see he'll outgrow all that nonsense of Nationalism! Send him to Oxford as soon as you can. He'll soon get hold of some other tomfoolery there, and forget this. Seven devils worse than the first, in fact!"

The Reverend Charles laughed, wheezily, and began, automatically, to fill a pipe, an indication of a change of mental outlook.

"Worse?" cried Miss Frederica, ardently; "no indeed, Mr. Fetherston! Better! Far better! Anything is preferable to this—this Second-rate Sedition!"

When Frederica perorated, and this remark partook of the nature of peroration, it was as though she took a header into deep water. By the time she had again risen to the surface of her emotions, the Reverend Charles Fetherston had returned to the hinge of the garden-gate, and Miss Coppinger, knowing her man, made no attempt to recall him. She had a very special regard for her rector, of a complex sort that is not quite easy to define. There was veneration in it, the veneration that was inculcated in her youth for the clergy; there was the compassion that many capable and self-confident women bestow upon any man to whom Providence has denied a feminine protector; there was a regretful pity for his shortcomings—(but half-acknowledged, even to herself)—as a Minister of the Word, counterbalanced by respect for his worldly wisdom; above all, there was the deep, peculiar interest that was excited in her by any clergyman, merely in virtue of his office, a person whose trade it was to occupy himself with the art and practice of religion, which was a subject that had, quite apart from its spiritual side, the same appeal for her that the art and practice of the theatre has for many others. (It is hard to imagine any simile that would have shocked Frederica more than this; in all her years of strenuous, straightforward life, she had never, as she would have said, set foot in a theatre.)

Frederica had been born at Coppinger's Court, and she had passed her childhood there, but her youth had been spent in Dublin, in the hot heart of a parish devoted to good works, and to a pastor whose power and authority was in no degree less absolute than that of any of the "Romish priests" whom he so heartily denounced. She was brought up in that school of Irish Low Church Protestantism that makes more severe demands upon submission and credulity than any other, and yet more fiercely arraigns other creeds on those special counts. It is quite arguable that Irish people, like the Israelites who so ardently desired a king, enjoy and thrive under religious oppression, and it is beyond dispute that among the oppressed, of both the rival creeds, are saints whose saintliness has gained force from the systems to which they have given their allegiance. To Frederica the practice of her cult both inwardly in her heart, and outwardly in the work of St. Matthew's Parish, was the mainspring of her existence. It was also her pastime. She would analyse a sermon, as Dick Lowry would discuss a run, and with the same eager enjoyment. She assented with enthusiasm to the Doctrine of Eternal Damnation, and a gentler-hearted creature than she never lived. She would have gone to the stake for the Verbal Inspiration of the Bible; she was as convinced that the task of Creation was completed in a week, as she was that she paid the Coppinger's Court workmen for six days' work every Saturday evening. In short, the good Frederica was a survival of an earlier and more earnest period, and her religious beliefs were only comparable, in their sincerity and simplicity, with those of the Roman Catholic poor people, whose spiritual prospects were to her no less black (theoretically) than were hers to them.

Those who know Ireland will have no difficulty in believing that Miss Coppinger had no warmer sympathisers in her feelings concerning Larry and the Mangan household than the Coppinger's Court retainers, despite the fact that none of them were of her communion, nor did they share her political views. And no less will those who know Ireland, recognise that in the Irish countryside it is the extremes that touch, and that there is a sympathy and understanding between the uppermost and the lowest strata of Irish social life, which is not extended, by either side, to the intervening one. Thus, it was that Frederica could, and did converse with her work-people and her peasant neighbours, with a freedom and an implicit confidence in their good breeding, that it is to be feared she was incapable of extending to Larry's new acquaintances in Cluhir. Possibly the outdoor life, and the mutual engrossment in outdoor affairs, explain, in some degree, this sympathy, but at the root of it is the certainty on both sides, that the well-bred, even the chivalrous point of view, will govern their intercourse.

It may seem somewhat excessive to use the word chivalry in connection with Mrs. Twomey, the Coppinger's Court dairy-woman. Yet, I dare to say that as great a soul filled the four feet four inches that comprised her excessively plain little person, as ever inspired warrior or fighting queen in the brave days of old. Bred and born under the Talbot-Lowrys, she had crossed the river when she married one of the Coppinger's Court workmen, and for close on thirty-five years she had milked the cows and ruled the dairy according to her own methods, which were as rigorous as they were remarkable, and altered not with modern enlightenment, or conformed with hygienic laws. Her husband was a feeble creature, whose sole claim to distinction was his inability to speak English. At the time that "The Family," (which is, say, Frederica and Larry) returned, he had become quite blind, and he passed a cloistered existence in a dark corner of his little cottage, sitting, with his hat always upon his head, a being seemingly as withdrawn from the current of life as one of the smoky brown and white china dogs on the shelf above the wide hearth.

The legend ran that when he was young, a marriage had been arranged for him. On the appointed wedding-day he had gone to the chapel, the priest was there, and the wedding-guests, but no bride came. Michael Twomey therefore, after a fruitless exercise of patience, left the chapel in deep wrath and humiliation, and proceeded to walk home again. On the road he was faced by a string of laughing girls, and among them there was little Mary Driscoll. Mary had then, no doubt, such grace as youth can give, and that she had, at least, good teeth, was obvious to the disgruntled Michael Twomey, as she was grinning at him from ear to ear. Also, possibly, his sight may not even then have been of the best. Be that as it may, Michael caught at Mary's arm.

"Come on to the chapel, Mary!" he shouted at her, in the Irish that was a more common speech in those days than it is now; "The priest is there yet, and the money is in my pocket. I'll marry you!"

Michael had made a luckier hit than he knew. Little Mary Driscoll recognised the sporting quality of the suggestion, and being a girl of spirit acceded to it.

Mary had been to America. She was one of the many of her class who put forth fearlessly for the United States, adventuring upon the unknown without any of the qualms that would beset them were the bourne London, or even one of the cities of their native land. Wasn't Mary's mother's sisther's daughter, and Maggie Brian from Tullagh, and the dear knows how many more cousins and neighbours, before her in it? Didn't her brother that was marrit in it, send her her ticket, and wasn't there good money to be airned in it?

These queries, that, as may be seen by anyone with half an eye, answered themselves, having been propounded by little Mary Driscoll, she, roaring crying, and keened by all her relatives to the coach-door—no railway being within thirty miles of her home—departed to America, and was swallowed up by "Boyshton" for the space of five years, during the passage of which, since she could neither read nor write, no communication passed between her and her parents, save only the postal orders that, through an intermediary, she unfailingly sent them. Then there was a month that the postal order came not, and while the old father and mother were wondering was Mary dead, or what ailed her, Mary walked in, uglier than ever in her Boyshton clothes, and it was gloriously realised that not only was not Mary dead at all, but that she had as much saved as would bury the old people, or maybe marry herself.

Mary had not enjoyed America. She wouldn't get her health in it, she said.

("Ye wouldn't see a fat face or a red cheek on one o' thim that comes back," assented Mary's mother); and for as little as she was, Mary continued, she'd rather bring her bones home with herself to Cunnock-a-Ceoil. (A cryptic phrase signifying that though she recognised, humorously, her own unworthiness, she still attached sufficient importance to her person to wish to bestow it upon the place of her birth.) Not long after her return and restoration to health, the episode of her marriage had occurred, and she had settled down into the soil of Ireland again, with, possibly, a slightly increased freedom of manner, but, saving this, with no more token on her of her dash into the new world, than has the little fish that lies and pants on the river bank for a moment, before the angler contemptuously chucks him into the stream again.

Michael and Mary Twomey had been on the staff of Coppinger's Court for a full thirty years when, in the fullness of time, Frederica returned to her ancient home, bringing with her the young heir to it, and all its accessory tenanted lands. Not Green Dragon or The Norreys King-at-Arms, or any other pontiff of pedigrees, could attach a higher importance to gentle blood than did little elderly Mary Twomey, elderly, but still as indomitably nimble and resolute as when in Frederica's childhood she would catch the donkey for her, and run after it, belabouring it in its rider's interest, for half an afternoon.

In spite of the fact that Miss Coppinger's youth had been spent, chiefly, in a town, the love of the country, ingrained during her first years, was merely dormant, and it revived with her return to Coppinger's Court. The garden, the farm, the hens, the cattle, the dairy, were all interests to which she returned with that renewal of early passion, that has in it the fervour of youth as well as the depth of maturity. She read agricultural papers insatiably, and believed all that she read, accepting the verbal inspiration of their advertisements with the enthusiasm of her religious beliefs. She was a doctrinaire farmer, and she applied to the garden, the farm and the poultry-yard, the same zeal and intensity that had made her in earlier days the backbone of committees, and the leading exponent of the godly activities of St. Matthew's. She was regarded by the heretofore rulers of these various provinces with a mixture of respect, contempt, and apprehension. She was an incalculable force, with a predisposition towards novelty, and novelty, especially if founded on theory, is abhorrent to such as old Johnny Galvin the steward, or Peter Flood the gardener, or, stiffest in her own conceit of all, Mrs. Twomey of the dairy.

"Master Larry's coming home from Cluhir tomorrow, Mary," Miss Coppinger announced, with satisfaction, to the peculiar confection of grey hair and black chenille net that represented the back of Mrs. Twomey's head, her forehead being pressed against the side of the cow that she was milking.

"Thang-aade!" replied Mrs. Twomey fervently, expressing in this concise form her gratitude to her Creator for what she considered to be Larry's release from a very vile durance "He's long enough in it already!"

"The Doctor wouldn't let me move him any sooner," replied Miss Coppinger, apologetically.

"The divil doubt him, what a fool he'd be!" said Mrs. Twomey with a bitter laugh. "Aren't they all sayin' as sure as gun is iron it's what he wants that he'll see his daughter in Coppinger's Court before he dies!"

"What nonsense!" said Miss Coppinger, warmly; "I should like to know who is saying it!"

Mrs. Twomey, milking ceaselessly, slewed her head a little and looked at her employer out of the corner of an eye as bright and as cunning as a hen's, and said: "As rich as your Honour is, you couldn't put a penny into the mouth of every man that's sayin' it!"

"I'm surprised at you, Mary," said Frederica, indignantly, "You ought to have more sense than to repeat such rubbish!"

To this reproach, Mrs. Twomey responded with a long and jubilant crow of laughter.

"Yerra, gerr'l alive—!" she corrected herself quickly. "My lady alive, I should say—sure a little thing like me'd tell lies as fast as a hen'd pick peas!"

The modesty, as well as the accuracy, of this statement silenced Miss Coppinger for a moment.

"Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she resumed with much severity. "It is amazing to me how a decent, respectable little woman like you can not only tell lies, but boast of it!"

"Ah ha! I'm the same owld three and fourpince, an' will be till I die!" triumphed Mrs. Twomey, with another screech of laughter, removing her tiny person, her milk-pail, and her stool from under the cow. "An' I won't be long dyin'!" another screech; "an' it won't take many to carry me to Cunnock-a-Ceoil Churchyard!"

A final and prolonged burst of mirth succeeded this announcement, during which the unrepentant Three and Fourpence swung the pail on to the hook of the swinging-balance for weighing the milk that was Miss Coppinger's latest and most detested innovation.

"Look at that now what she has for you, Miss! Shixteen pints! An' I'll engage I'll knock thirteen ounces o' butther out of it! That's the little bracket cow that yourself and Johnny Galvin wanted to sell, an' I withstood ye!"

This was of the nature, jointly, of a counter-attack and of a truckle to the system of milk-records, but Frederica heeded it not As a matter of fact, she was still somewhat discomposed by the insinuations that were more numerous than the pennies she was believed to possess.

"I hope, Mary," she said, repressively, "that if you should hear any more talk of that kind about Dr. Mangan, you will do your best to contradict it. He has been extremely kind to Master Larry, and it annoys me very much that such things should be said."

Mrs. Twomey's supple mind was swift to realise that a change of attitude was advisable.

"Why then, upon my truth and body, I'd blame no one that wanted Master Larry! That little fella is in tune with all the world!" she declared; "but those people do be always gibbing and gabbing! Give them a smell, and they're that suspeecious they'll do the rest! Sure I said to that owld man below, Mikey Twomey"—thus dispassionately was Mrs. Twomey wont to speak of her husband—"I says to him, that your Honour was satisfied to leave Master Larry back in Cluhir till he'd be well agin. They were all sayin' the child wouldn't be said by ye to come back! Didn't I have to put the heighth o' the house o' curses to it before he'd believe me!"

"Intolerable nonsense!" said Frederica, hotly.



CHAPTER XIII

People have said, retrospectively, that the rise of the Mangan family dated from the fall of Larry Coppinger into the Feorish River. This may, or may not have been the case but it is certain that Mrs. Mangan's way through the world took at about this time an upward trend, and one of the most perceptible ascending jerks was the result of Lady Isabel Talbot-Lowry's Sale of Work.

This function had been ordained with, for object, the provision of a fund for the renovation of the parish church of Knock Ceoil, and was obviously a matter without interest for persons of another denomination. Lady Isabel, and Miss Coppinger, and others of their friends and neighbours slaved at the provision of munitions for it, as good women will slave at such enterprises, squandering energy on the construction of those by-products of the rag-bag that wen specially consecrated to charitable purposes by the ladies of their period.

"No one will want to buy this rubbish," said Miss Coppinger, who never tried to deceive even herself, "but people will have to spend their money on something, and we're not going to raffle bottles of brandy—as they did at that R.C. Bazaar in Riverstown!"

Frederica could be just, but when a question of religion intervened, she found it hard to be generous.

The Sale of Work took place during the September that followed the winter of Larry's disaster, and it was indisputable that the Mangan family contributed materially to its success. Mrs. Mangan was of a class that is accustomed to get its money's worth, and was herself known and respected as an able and inveterate haggler. Yet, at the Mount Music Sale, she was content to hide her talent beneath innumerable chair-backs and night-dress cases, purchased, uncomplainingly, at the prices marked on them, and to permit the contents of an apparently inexhaustible purse to flow in a golden stream from stall to stall. Her family were no less in evidence, the Big Doctor offering himself a cheerful victim on the shrine of raffles, even attaching himself to Christian as a coadjutor in the sale of tickets for the disposal of one of Rinka's latest progeny. Mrs. Mangan's son and daughter, something subdued by unfamiliar surroundings, were, on the disposal of the puppy-tickets, taken in hand by their father, and were, with an eloquence that seemed meant for a larger audience, made acquainted with the notable objects of the house.

"If I could get hold of your mother, now," the Big Doctor would say, "I'd like her to see this," or "Look at that picture, Tishy! That's a lovely woman! The Major's grandmother, I believe. We'll ask Miss Judith—'pon my honour, it might have been done of herself!"

Miss Judith, with a fruit and flower stall near the portrait in question, coldly admitted the relationship, and ignored the question of the likeness. Judith was of the age of intolerance; moreover, she was at that moment in the act of selling a button-hole to Bill Kirby, and the Doctor's enthusiasm was undesired.

The little family party moved on, while Dr. Mangan, with the ease of an habitue, indicated to his son and daughter the ancestral portraits in the dining-room, the Cromwellian arms on the staircase, the coats-of-arms, the Indian weapons, the foxes' masks in the hall. The son and daughter received the information coldly. It was their first introduction to the interior of Mount Music, and while Tishy was filled with a great resolve to be impressed by nothing, Barty was silenced by those tortures that unfamiliar surroundings have power to inflict upon the shy.

In his determination to instruct his young in all the possible objects of interest, Dr. Mangan strolled away from the crowded scene of the sale, and led them down the long passage, dedicated to sporting prints, that led to the library.

"There's a picture there that's worth seeing, of a Meeat Coppinger's Court in the time of Larry's grandfather," he announced impressively, as he opened the door. "The Talbot-Lowrys and the Coppingers were always fine sports men—"

A tall old screen stood between the door and the fireplace from behind it a hunted voice said:

"Who the devil's there now?"

Dr. Mangan thought, complacently: "My diagnosis was correct!" Aloud he said to his son and daughter, in a tone of hoarse consternation: "To think of our blundering in on the Major like this! Here! Away now, the pair of you!"

He advanced from behind the screen.

"Major! My most humble apologies! I never thought of you being here! I was showing that boy and girl of mine some of your beautiful things."

Major Talbot-Lowry was unlike his daughter Judith in many things, and not least in his easy sufferance of those whom she, in youthful arrogance, called cads.

"Come in, Doctor, and have a cigar in peace," he said, hospitably, putting on one side the novel he was reading. "I thought you were Evans, or one of the maids, coming to bother me. This damned show has turned the house upside down!"

"Well, it seems a great success," said Dr. Mangan cordially.

"Very good of you to come," responded his host, "more especially when it's—er—it's—er—such a purely local affair—"

Dr. Mangan understood that he was receiving the meed of religious tolerance.

"Well, Major," he said, expansively, "I lived long enough one time in England to learn that we mustn't give in too much to the clerical gentlemen! My own instinct is to be neighbourly, and to let my friends mind their own religion."

"Quite so, quite so," said Major Dick, magnanimously, forgetting, for the moment, those epithets that, in his more heated moments, he was accustomed to apply to the ministers of the Church to which he did not belong. "Quite so, Doctor. I'm all for toleration, and let the parsons fight it out among 'em! Busy men, like you and me, haven't time to worry about these affairs—we've other things to think about!" He stretched a long arm for a box of cigars, and handed it to his visitor; "sit down for a bit. There's no hurry. The ladies can have it all their own way for a while!"

Dr. Mangan lowered his huge person into an armchair of suitable proportions, and for some moments smoked his cigar in appreciative silence. As a matter of fact, he was planning an approach to the subject that had instigated his visit to the library, but he was in no hurry to begin upon it, remembering that the longest way round is often the shortest way home.

"By the way, Major," he said, taking the cigar from his mouth, and regarding it with affection, "did some one tell me that you were looking for a farming horse?"

"If they didn't, they might have," replied Dick. "McKinnon's at me to get another. I was going to ask you if you knew of anything?"

"Well, now, that's funny. I was wondering to myself this morning what I'd do with that big brown horse of mine. He'll not go hunting again, he never got the better of that hurt he got. But he's the very cut of a farm-horse. You see, the poor devil had to carry me!" ended the Big Doctor, with a laugh at himself.

"I'll tell McKinnon of him. He wants a horse that will—" a recital of the accomplishments exacted by Dick's steward followed.

Dr. Mangan listened with attention.

"Tell McKinnon he'd better have him over on trial. I know him and his requirements! The horse mightn't be able to play the piano for him!" said the Doctor, facetiously. "I'm not afraid of you, Major, but I've a great respect for Mr. McKinnon!"

"Oh, I'll tell old Mack he'll be lucky to get him," said Dick, with his pleasant laugh; "you and I will strike the bargain!"

The approach had been pegged out, and Dr. Mangan turned, for the moment, to other subjects.

It was a damp and sodden day near the beginning of September, and a comfortable turf fire centralised and gave point to the room, as a fire inevitably does. Major Talbot-Lowry was in the habit of saying that the day of the month never warmed anybody yet, and if it was only for the sake of the books—the truth being that the library fire at Mount Music had never, in the memory of housemaid, been extinguished save only when "the Major was out of home." Dick, like most out-of-door men, considered that fresh air should be kept in its proper place, outside the walls of the house, and an ancient atmosphere, in which the varied scents of turf, tobacco, old books, and old hound-couples, all had their share, filled the large, dingy old room. Dusty and composite squirrel-hoards of objects that defy classification, covered outlying tables, and lay in heaps on the floor, awaiting that resurrection to useful life that Major Talbot-Lowry's faith held would some day be theirs, and were, in the meantime, the despair and demoralisation of housemaids.

Deep in the bearskin rug in front of the fire (a trophy of one of the rifles that filled a glass-fronted case over the mantel-shelf) lay the two little fox-terriers, Rinka and Tashpy, in moody and determined repose. For a brief period of suffering they had attempted to cleave to Christian; but as the throng grew, and the time for tea lingered, they had, in high offence, betaken themselves to their ultimate citadel, the library.

"I suppose it was her pup I was raffling awhile ago," remarked Dr. Mangan, presently, as Rinka languidly rose, and having stretched herself, and yawned, musically and meretriciously, put her nose on his broad knee, deliberating as to whether the distinction of a human lap outweighed the lowly comfort of the bearskin.

"Doggie! Poor doggie! Down, now, down!" Dr. Mangan had no idea how to talk to dogs, and he did not wish Rinka to sit on his best grey trousers.

"Hit her a smack!" said Major Dick; "don't let her bother you. Christian has spoilt these dogs till they're perfect nuisances! Yes, it's her pup. Who won it? It ought to be a clinker; it was the best of the lot—"

"I d'no did they draw for it yet. I took three tickets for it myself," said the Doctor. "I want it for a sort of a cousin of me own—a very sporting chap that's coming to Cluhir; he asked me could I get him a dog."

"What's he going to do in Cluhir?" asked Dick, carelessly.

The approach was now clear, and Dr. Mangan began to advance.

"Well, he's just taken his degree. He's a doctor, and he's coming here for a while. He can give me a help while he's looking out for a dispensary. He'd like some place where he'd get a little hunting now and then. I expect you know his father, Major—old Tom Aherne, of Pribawn—"

Major Talbot-Lowry became more interested.

"You don't say old Tom's son is a doctor! By Jove! That's very creditable to him—a decent old fellow Tom was—and you say he wants to hunt? That's the right sort of doctor! Look here!"

Dick sat up, the light of inspiration woke in his ingenuous blue eyes, he wrinkled his forehead with the super-intelligent concentration of a not very brilliant intellect. "Didn't I hear that old Fogarty is giving up the Dispensary here? Why don't you run him for that?"

The shepherding of Dick Lowry was really an affair of a simplicity unworthy of preparation made by that ruse old collie, the Big Doctor. Nevertheless, being an artist, he continued to play the game.

"Knock Ceoil! Begad, that's a great notion! Now I come to think of it, I did hear something of old Fogarty giving up, but somehow I never thought of young Danny Aherne in connection with it. I thought I was as well able as any man to put two and two together, but I declare I might never have thought of it if it hadn't been for you! They say, if you're too close to a thing, you can't see it!"

Thus did the collie yap, while the sheep (who was a member of the Dispensary Committee) gratified, and pleasantly conscious of originality, trotted up the path and into the fold that had been prepared for it.

Meanwhile, in what house-agents call the reception-rooms, the Sale of Work raged on, with auctions, with raffles, with card-fortunes, told in a cave of rugs by a devoted sorceress, in a temperature that would inure her to face with composure the witch's destiny at the stake; with "occasional music," that fell upon the turmoil of talk more softly than any petals from blown roses on the grass, and was just sufficiently perceptible to impart the requisite flavour of festivity. One item of the musical programme had indeed had power to still the storm, but since it was contributed by the Mangan Quartet, it must be admitted that, charming though it was, it owed something of its success to surprise. The countryside had rallied to Lady Isabel with a response that did credit to her as to them, yet, thronged though the rooms were the Mangan family shone with a unique lustre as alone representing the mighty Church of Rome.

"Wonderful of them to come!" said the Church of Ireland ladies approvingly; "the only R.C.'s here!"

Yet the Mangan family was not quite alone in this representative position; young Mr. Coppinger, their (as it were) inventor and patentee, shared it with them, and was, moreover, beginning, for the first time, and not without displeasure, to realise something of the social complications that are involved by the difference of creed. It was a matter of atmosphere; quite intangible, and quite perceptible. Larry was discovering that he was something of an anomaly. "Only an R.C. by accident," as he had heard someone say, in apparent extenuation (a benevolence that he found irritating). He was learning the meaning of the sudden silences, the too obvious changes of the course of conversation, that seemed to occur when he drew near. He had not, as yet, formulated these things to himself, but, on this turbulent afternoon, it was possibly some livelier apprehension of them that made him gravitate towards Barty Mangan, as towards a fellow pariah, and induced him to seek with him the far asylum of the schoolroom. There, save for the schoolroom cat, they were alone, and they sat for some minutes in grateful silence, looking out, across misty stretches of grass, to the river, and beyond it to the dense green of the trees of Coppinger's Court. The sky was very low and grey; by leaning out of the window a little, a far-off reach of river, at the western end of the valley, could be descried; above it there was a narrow slit in the clouds, and through it a faint and lovely primrose light fell, like a veil, that hid, while it told of the deathbed repentance of the dying day. Larry dragged his chair into the corner of the window, and watched the growing glory of the sunset with all his ardent soul in his eyes.

Whatever this boy did, he did vividly, and to Barty Mangan, seated on the shadow side, watching him, he was, as ever, a pageant, a being of incalculable impulse, of flashing intensity and splendour.

"Where on earth did you go, Barty? I looked about for you for ages before I found you; but there was such an awful crowd of women—I'm jolly glad to get out of it!" Larry leaned back in his chair and proceeded to light a cigarette, as an assertion of the rights of a man of nearly seventeen.

"My father was taking Tishy and me about, showing us the house," replied Barty, apologetically. (As a matter of fact, he said "me fawther," but if this, and similar details of pronunciation, are not known by nature, it is labour in vain to attempt to indicate them by means of the wholly inadequate English alphabet.) "Larry," he went on, with the candour that made a gentleman of him, "I never was in a house like this before. I declare to you it frightens me! I feel like a rat gone astray! I was in the dining-room by myself, looking at the pictures, and that old fella' of a butler came in and frightened the heels off me! He kept an eye on me that was like a flame from a blow-pipe! You'd say he thought I was going to steal the house!"

"I expect he did, too," said Larry, "especially if he thought that you were a pal of mine. He hates me like blazes. He's one of those damned Orangemen. I say, do you remember that thing in The Spirit of the Nation, 'Orange and Green will carry the Day'? I bet old Evans would rather lose, any day, than be 'linked in his might' with a Papist like you or me! It's a most extraordinary thing how religion plays the devil with Ireland!"

There are certain standard truisms that must be rediscovered by each successive generation (possibly because they have bored the preceding one to extinction), and Larry was of the age at which truisms reveal themselves as new ideas, and sing and shine with the radiancy of morning stars. He was also young enough, and just sufficiently interested in religion, to find it exciting to denounce it. The fervour of his indictment lifted him from his chair, and he stood, with the evening light on his hot face, enjoying his theme, and his audience.

"I stayed with some people in England last holidays, friends of my people's; Protestants they were, too—Sour-faces,' as the 'Leader' calls them!—and they didn't give a blow what religion I was! That was my affair, they thought—and so it was, too! Not like this crowd here—I don't mean my own people, you know," he added hastily, "they're all right!"