ins. London was their metropolis, and to
London, in the fashions of their remote province, they would return with
amusing tales of Irish savagery that made them good company in an
eighteenth century coffee-house. Little by little they found their
English interests waning, and the social centre shifting westwards.
Dublin became their city, and to a stately house in Merrion Square the
family coach migrated in the season, until, at last, it seemed hardly
worth while to cross the dreariness of the central plain, and a
town-house in Galway seemed the zenith of urbanity. Galway, indeed, had
risen on a wave of prosperity. In the streets above the Claddagh,
merchants who had grown rich in the Spanish trade were building solid
houses with carved lintels and windows of stained glass. The Hewishes
invested money in these new ventures. In Galway a Hewish of Roscarna was
somebody: there the family was taken for granted and, following the way
of least resistance, the Hewishes settled down into the state of
provincial notabilities.

Notabilities as long as the Spanish money lasted--then notorieties. For,
as Roscarna, the symbol of a tradition, decayed, the men of the Hewish
family developed a curious recklessness in living.

It was as though the original vigour of the tree planted in a foreign
soil had been enough to keep it fighting and flourishing for a couple of
hundred years and then had suddenly failed, dying, as a tree will, from
above downwards.

For the first half of the nineteenth century a series of dissolute
Hewishes--they never bred in great numbers--lived wildly upon the edge of
Connemara, drinking and fighting and gaming and wenching while the roof
of Roscarna grew leaky and the long stables were turned into pigsties,
and soft mud silted over the marble bottom below the Palladian bridge.
If they had lived in England the estate would have vanished field by
field until nothing but the house was left; but the outer land at
Roscarna was of no marketable value, and when Sir Jocelyn succeeded to
the property in the year 1870, he found himself master of many worthless
acres and a ruined house that he was powerless to repair. It was no
wonder that he went to the dogs like his father before him, for the
passage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course
he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was
an expensive calling. As a baronet--even as an Irish baronet--a good
dea