onitions, his box-hedges and white peacocks, and the fancy
of some Hewish unknown had blossomed at last in a Palladian bridge of
freestone, spanning the quiet river.

Roscarna, in fact, was a bold experiment, destined from the first to
fail. Never, in all its history, could it have become the living thing
that its founders dreamed, any more than the Protestant Church that they
built in the village of Clonderriff could be the home of a living faith;
for though they turned their backs upon the mountains of Joyce's Country,
the mountains were always there, and the house itself, which should have
glowed with the warmth of red brick, or one of those soft building-stones
that mellow as they weather, seemed always cold and desolate, being made
of a hard, cold, Connaught rock, that made the Palladian bridge look like
the fanciful toy that it was, and grew bleaker, bluer, colder, as the
years went by.

I think of it as one thinks of the villas that Roman colonists built
above the marches of Wales, built obstinately on the Roman plan that the
climate of Italy had dictated to their fathers, with open atrium and
terraces protected from the sun. "What's good enough for Rome," they
said, "is surely good enough for Siluria," and, shivering, showed the
latest official visitor a landscape that might have been transported
bodily from the Sabine Hills ... if only there were more sun! "But we
_do_ miss the lizards and the cicalas," they would say with a sigh. No
doubt the most enthusiastic built themselves Palladian ... I mean
Etruscan bridges and marble stew-ponds for mullet, until, in the end, the
immense inertia of the surrounding country asserted itself and the
natural desires of mankind led to a mingling of British blood with
theirs, till the Roman of the first century became the Briton of the
third.

The parallel is as near as it may be, for though the first Hewish was an
Englishman, his great-great-grandson was Irish, and the only thing that
was left to remind him of his ancestry was the house of Roscarna, the
sullen Connaught stone fixed in an alien design, and the huge belt of
timber through which the gorse and heather were slowly creeping down from
the mountain and settling in the valley bottom that they had once
inhabited. But the foreign woods that trailed along the shore of the
lake were admirable for black-cock.

The transformation was very gradual. The first Hewishes, no doubt, kept
in touch with their English cous