ture, 'something worse happen to you.'"

It was a pleasant dinner party at the "Great House." Colonel Campion
presided. Bittra sat opposite her father. Captain Ormsby, Inspector of
Coast Guards, was near her. There were some bank officials from a
neighboring town; Lord L----'s agent and his wife; a military surgeon; a
widower, with two grown daughters; the new Protestant Rector and his
wife. Father Letheby was very much pleased. He was again in the society
that best suited his natural disposition. It was tolerably intelligent
and refined. The lights, the flowers, the music, told on his senses,
long numbed by the quietness and monotony of his daily life. He entered
into the quiet pleasures of the evening with zest, made all around him
happy, and even fascinated by the brilliancy with which he spoke, so
much so that Bittra Campion said to him, as he was leaving about eleven
o'clock:--

"Father, we are infinitely obliged to you."

He returned home, filled with a pleasant excitement, that was now so
unusual to him in his quiet, uneventful life. The moonlight was
streaming over sea and moorland, and he thought, as he passed over the
little bridge that spanned the fiord, and stepped out into the broad
road:--

"A delightful evening! But I must be careful. These Sybaritic banquets
unfit a man for sterner work! I shall begin to hate my books and to
loathe my little cabin. God forbid! But how pleasant it was all. And how
Campion and Ormsby jumped at that idea of mine about the fishing
schooner. I look on the matter now as accomplished. After all, perhaps,
these Irish gentry are calumniated. Nothing could equal the ardor of
these men for the welfare of the poor fishermen. Who knows? In six
months' time, the 'Star of the Sea' may be ploughing the deep, and a
fleet of sailing boats in her wake; and then the fish-curing stores,
and, at last, the poor old village will look up and be known far and
wide. Dear me! I must get that lovely song out of my brain, and the odor
of those azaleas out of my senses. 'T will never do! A Kempis would
shame me; would arraign me as a rebel and a traitor. What a lovely
night! and how the waters sleep in the moonlight! Just there at the bend
we'll build the new pier. I see already the 'Star of the Sea' putting
out, and the waters whitening in her wake."

He looked around, and saw the cottages of the peasants and the laborers
gleaming against the dark background of the moor and the mountain; and
th