doubt. I turned abruptly away, put
spurs to my horse, and dashed up the steep pass at a pace which evidently
surprised, and as evidently displeased, my follower.

How natural it is ever to experience a reaction of depression and lowness
after the first burst of unexpected joy! The moment of happiness is
scarce experienced ere come the doubts of its reality, the fears for its
continuance; the higher the state of pleasurable excitement, the more
painful and the more pressing the anxieties that await on it; the tension
of delighted feelings cannot last, and our overwrought faculties seek
repose in regrets. Happy he who can so temper his enjoyments as to view
them in their shadows as in their sunshine; he may not, it is true, behold
the landscape in the blaze of its noonday brightness, but he need not fear
the thunder-cloud nor the hurricane. The calm autumn of _his_ bliss, if it
dazzle not in its brilliancy, will not any more be shrouded in darkness and
in gloom.

My first burst of pleasure over, the thought of my uncle's changed fortunes
pressed deeply on my heart, and a hundred plans suggested themselves in
turn to my mind to relieve his present embarrassments; but I knew how
impracticable they would all prove when opposed by his prejudices. To
sell the old home of his forefathers, to wander from the roof which had
sheltered his name for generations, he would never consent to; the law
might by force expel him, and drive him a wanderer and an exile, but of
his own free will the thing was hopeless. Considine, too, would encourage
rather than repress such feelings; his feudalism would lead him to any
lengths; and in defence of what he would esteem a right, he would as soon
shoot a sheriff as a snipe, and, old as he was, ask for no better amusement
than to arm the whole tenantry and give battle to the king's troops on the
wide plain of Scariff. Amidst such conflicting thought, I travelled on
moodily and in silence, to the palpable astonishment of Mike, who could not
help regarding me as one from whom fortune met the most ungrateful returns.
At every new turn of the road he would endeavor to attract my attention by
the objects around,--no white-turreted chateau, no tapered spire in the
distance, escaped him; he kept up a constant ripple of half-muttered praise
and censure upon all he saw, and instituted unceasing comparisons between
the country and his own, in which, I am bound to say, Ireland rarely, if
ever, had to complain