e, which I believe
we promised them, we should have been at the head of the poll; but the
freeholders were to a man opposed to us.

I am told that our opponents behaved ungenerously and unjustly--perhaps
they did; at all events, the end of the contest left us without a single
acquaintance, and we stood alone in our glory of beaten candidateship,
after three months of unheard-of fatigue, and more meanness than I
care to mention. The end of all was, to shake the dust off our feet at
Herefordshire, and advertise Earlshope for sale. Meanwhile we returned
to town; just as shipwrecked men clamber up the first rock in sight, not
feeling in their danger what desolation is before them. I take it that
the generals of a beaten army talk very little over their late defeat.
At all events we observed a most scrupulous reserve, and I don't think
that a word was dropped amongst us for a month that could have led a
stranger to believe that we had just been beaten in an election, and
hunted out of the county.

I was just beginning to feel that our lesson, a severe one, it is true,
might redound to our future benefit, when our eldest-born--I call them
all mine, Dora, though not one of them will say mamma to me--discovered
that there was an Irish estate to be sold, with a fine house and fine
grounds, and that if we could n't be great folk in the grander kingdom,
there was no saying what we might not be in the smaller one. This was
too much for me. I accepted the Herefordshire expedition because it
smacked of active service. I knew well we should be defeated, and I knew
there would be a battle, but I could not consent to banishment. What had
I done, I asked myself over and over, that I should be sent to live in
Ireland?

I tried to get up a party against the project, and failed. Augustus
Bramleigh--our heir--was in its favor, indeed its chief promoter.
Temple, the second son, who is a secretary of embassy, and the most
insufferable of puppies, thought it a "nice place for us," and certain
to save us money; and John,--Jack they call him,--who is in the navy,
thinks land to be land, besides that, he was once stationed at Cork, and
thought it a paradise. If I could do little with the young men, I did
less with the girls. Marion, the eldest, who deems her papa a sort
of divine-right head of a family, would not discuss the scheme; and
Eleanor, who goes in for nature and spontaneous feeling, replied that
she was overjoyed at the thought of Ire