le lake, Castle Dargan and Castle
Fury. The squireen lived in a small house whither his family had moved
from their castle some time in the 18th century, and two old Miss Furys,
who let lodgings in Sligo, were the last remnants of the breed of the
other ruin. Once in every year he drove to Sligo for the two old women,
that they might look upon the ancestral stones and remember their
gentility, and he would put his wildest horses into the shafts to enjoy
their terror.

He himself, with a reeling imagination, knew not what he could be at to
find a spur for the heavy hours. The first day I came there, he gave my
cousin a revolver, (we were upon the high road,) and to show it off, or
his own shooting, he shot a passing chicken; and half an hour later, when
he had brought us to the lake's edge under his castle, now but the broken
corner of a tower with a winding stair, he fired at or over an old
countryman who was walking on the far edge of the lake. The next day I
heard him settling the matter with the old countryman over a bottle of
whiskey, and both were in good humour. Once he had asked a timid aunt of
mine if she would like to see his last new pet, and thereupon had marched
a race-horse in through the hall door and round the dining-room table. And
once she came down to a bare table because he had thought it a good joke
to open the window and let his harriers eat the breakfast. There was a
current story, too, of his shooting, in the pride of his marksmanship, at
his own door with a Martini-Henry rifle till he had shot the knocker off.
At last he quarrelled with my great-uncle William Middleton, and to avenge
himself gathered a rabble of wild country-lads and mounted them and
himself upon the most broken-down rascally horses he could lay hands on
and marched them through Sligo under a land-league banner. After that,
having neither friends nor money, he made off to Australia or to Canada.
I fished for pike at Castle Dargan and shot at birds with a muzzle-loading
pistol until somebody shot a rabbit and I heard it squeal. From that on I
would kill nothing but the dumb fish.

XI

We left Bedford Park for a long thatched house at Howth, Co. Dublin. The
land war was now at its height and our Kildare land, that had been in the
family for many generations, was slipping from us. Rents had fallen more
and more, we had to sell to pay some charge or mortgage, but my father and
his tenants parted without ill-will. During the worst