very
handsome, very popular daughters--the Right Honourable Ladies
Bridget-Mary, Alyse, and Alethea Bawne--consulted his favourite spiritual
director, and, as advised, offered his thin white hand and piously
regulated affections to Miss Nancy McIleevy, niece and heiress of McIleevy
of McIleevystown, the eminent County Down brewer, so celebrated for his
old Irish ales and nourishing bottled porter.

This lady, being sufficiently youthful, of good education and manners,
and of like faith with her elderly wooer, undertook, in return for an
ancient name and the title of Countess of Castleclare, to find the widower
in conjugal affection for the rest of his mortified life, and to do her
best to supply him with the grievously-needed heir. There was no wicked
fairy at Lord Castleclare's wedding, distinguished by the black-browed
beauty of the three bridesmaids, his daughters; and two years later saw
the beacons at the entrance of Ballybawne Harbour, on the West Connemara
coast, illuminated by the Castleclare tenants in honour of the arrival of
the desired heir, upon whom before his birth so much wealth had been
expended by Lord Castleclare in pilgrimages, donations, foundations, and
endowments that, some months after it, his lordship conveyed to his three
daughters that, in the interests of the Viscount, to whose swollen gums a
gold-set pebble enclosing a pious relic of an early Christian martyr was
at that moment affording miraculous relief, he, their father, would be
obliged by their providing themselves as soon as possible with husbands of
suitable rank, corresponding religion, and sufficient means to dispense
with the customary marriage portion.

Lady Alyse saw the justice of her father's views, and married the Duke of
Broads, an English Catholic peer; her younger sister, Alethea, went
obediently to the altar with the aged and enormously wealthy Prince de
Dignmont-Veziers. Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne, eldest and handsomest of the
three, pleaded--if a creature so stormy and imperious could be said to
plead--a previous engagement to an Ineligible.

"We have all heard of Captain Mildare of the Grey Hussars, my dear child,"
said Lord Castleclare, going to the door to make sure that those shrieks
that had proceeded from the Viscount's sumptuous suite of apartments,
situated at the top of the staircase rising at the end of the corridor
leading from his father's library, were stilled at the maternal fountain.
Finding that it was so