es of the nineteenth century, the class known as Landed Gentry was still pre-eminent in Ireland. Tenants

r places, geographically, if not their place, socially, in Irish every-day existence. There is little doubt but that after the monsters of the Primal Periods had been practically extinguished, a stray reptile, here and there, escaped the general doom, and, as Mr. Yeats says of his lug-worm,

ad been wounded in the thigh in a cavalry charge in a subsequent fight on the Afghan Frontier. Dick, like Horatius, "halted upon one knee" for the rest of his life, but since the injury gave him no trouble in the saddle, and did not affect the sit of his trousers, he

"Knockawn an K'yole Shee." The hill melted downwards-no other word can express the velvet softness of those mild, grassy slopes-to the shore of the River Broadwater, a slow and lordly stream, that moved mightily down the wide valley, became merged for a space in Lough Kieraun, and thence flowed onwards, broad and brimming, bearded with rushes, passing like a king, cloaked in the splendours of the sunset, to its suicide in the far-away Atlantic. The demesne of Mount Music lay along i

How many Anglo-Irish great-great-grandfathers have not raised these monuments to their English forbears, and then, recognising their obligations to their Irish mothers' ancestry, have filled them, gloriously, with horses and hounds, and butts of claret, and

nking, with s

n drinking my

rrow from sig

morrow would

ing there's no

ailing will s

reason, and

merry befo

d abhorrent to the Heaven-selected Head of a Family)-all these had driven wedges deep into the Mount Music estate. But, fortunately, a good-looking, long-legged, ex-Hussar need not rely exclusively on his patrimony, while matrimony is still within the sphere of practical politics. When, at close on

e regarded with mild surprise the large and strenuous family that rushed past her, as a mountain torrent might rush past an untidy flower garden, and, after nearly fourteen years of maternal experience, she had abandoned the search for a point of contact with their riotous souls, and contented herself with an indiscriminate affection for their very creditable bodies. Lady Isabel had-if the saying may be reversed-"les qualités de ses défauts," and these latter could have no environment less critical and more congenial than that in which it had pleased her mot

o an enquiring farmer, "I have f

ys: "Four blackguard boys and on

singular action of the mind, he t

e Four Blackguards began to clamour for mounts with the hounds, and the representatives of the Plentiful Sex outgrew the donkey, Major Talbot-Lowry had moments of resentment against his offspring, during which his wife, like a wise doe-rabbit, found it safest to sweep her children out of sight, and to sit at the mouth of the burrow, having armed herself with an appealing headache and a better din

Talbot-Lowry had a preference for one kitten more th

.F.H. at the Puppy Show. "Her mother can't keep her out of the kennels. And the h

ng that inner confidant, who always receives the raciest share of any conversation, he would say that

she shared the visiting M.F.H.'s view of the pos

irthday, when, after a long search, she had discovered her youngest daughter, seated, tailor-wise, in one of the kennels,

og, a sickly and much despised spaniel). "The Hounds!" Christian laughed a little; the laugh that is the flower of the root of scorn. Then her ey