to forego a pleasure which she saw
no reason for relinquishing.

My father exerted himself to the uttermost. Few men, I believe,
performed the host more gracefully; but nothing more fatally mars
the ease and destroys the charm of that character than anything like
over-effort at success. His attentions were too marked and too hurried;
he had exaggerated to himself the difficulties of his situation, and he
increased them tenfold by his own terrors.

The Duke was one of those plain, quiet, well-bred persons so frequently
met with in the upper classes of England, and whose strongest
characteristic is, probably, the excessive simplicity of their manners,
and the total absence of everything bordering on pretension. This
very quietude, however, is frequently misinterpreted, and, in Ireland
especially, often taken for the very excess of pride and haughtiness.
Such did it seem on the present occasion; for now that the restraint
of a great position was removed, and that he suffered himself to unbend
from the cumbrous requirements of a state existence, the ease of his
deportment was suspected to be indifference, and the absence of all
effort was deemed a contemptuous disregard for the company.

The moment, too, was not happily chosen to bring men of extreme and
opposite opinions into contact. They met with coldness and distrust;
they were even suspectful of the motives which had led to their
meeting,--in fact, a party whose elements were less suited to each other
rarely assembled in an Irish country-house; and by ill luck the weather
took one of those wintry turns which are not unfrequent in our so-called
summers, and set in to rain with that determined perseverance so common
to a July in Ireland.

Nearly all the resources by which the company were to have been amused
were of an outdoor kind, and depended greatly on weather. The shooting,
the driving, the picnicing, the visits to remarkable scenes in the
neighborhood, which Dan MacNaghten had "programmed" with such care and
zeal, must now be abandoned, and supplied by occupation beneath the
roof.

Oh, good reader, has it ever been your lot to have your house filled
with a large and incongruous party, weatherbound and "bored"? To see
them stealing stealthily about corridors, and peeping into rooms, as if
fearful of chancing on something more tiresome than themselves? To watch
their silent contemplation of the weather-glass, or their mournful gaze
at the lowering and leaden sk