u must press upon him the
necessity of being presented at once. We want to make him a D.L., and if
he enters Parliament, to give him the lieutenancy of the county."

While all these various criticisms were circulating, and amid an
atmosphere, as it were, impregnated by plots and schemes of every kind,
Cashel stood a very amused spectator of a scene wherein he never knew he
was the chief actor. It would indeed have seemed incredible to him
that he could, by any change of fortune, become an object of interested
speculation to lords, ladies, members of the Government, Church
dignitaries, and others. He was unaware that the man of fortune, with
a hand to offer, a considerable share of the influence property always
gives, livings to bestow, and money to lose, may be a very legitimate
mark for the enterprising schemes of mammas and ministers, suggesting
hopes alike to black-coats and blacklegs.

Perhaps, among the pleasant bits of credulity which we enjoy through
life, there is none sweeter than that implicit faith we repose in the
cordial expressions and flattering opinions bestowed upon us, when
starting in the race, by many who merely, in the jockey phrase,
"standing to win" upon us, have their own, and not _our_ interest before
them in the encouragement they bestow.

The discovery of the cheat is soon made, and we are too prone to revenge
our own over-confidence by a general distrust, from which, again,
experience, later on, rallies us. So that a young man's course is
usually from over-simplicity to over-shrewdness, and then again to
that negligent half-faith which either, according to the calibre of the
wearer, conceals deep knowledge of life, or hides a mistaken notion of
it. Let us return to Cashel, who now stood at the table, around which
a considerable number of the party were grouped, examining a number of
drawings, which Mr. Pepystell, the fashionable architect, had that day
sent for Roland's inspection; houses, villas, castles, cottages,
abbeys, shooting-boxes, gate-lodges, Tudor and Saxon, Norman and
Saracenic,--everything that the morbid imagination of architecture run
mad could devise and amalgamate between the chaste elegance of the Greek
and the tinkling absurdity of the Chinese.

"I do so love a cottage _ornee_," said Mrs. White, taking up a very
beautiful representation of one, where rose-colored curtains, and a
group on a grass-plot, with gay dresses and parasols, entered into the
composite architectur