d their
caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they
abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss
their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it;
but they are chiefly desirable as performers in an Anglo-Irish fantasia, a
Meredithian piece of comic music, with various national anthems, English,
Welsh, and Irish, running through and across it in all manner of guises,
and producing all manner of agreeable disharmonies.

In the beginning we have Patrick O'Donnell, an enthusiast, a Celt, a
Catholic, setting out for the English mansion of the father of Adiante
Adister to find if the girl cannot be pleaded over to reconsider her
refusal of his brother Philip. He arrives in the midst of turmoil in the
house, the cause of it being a hasty marriage which Adiante had
ambitiously contracted with a hook-nosed foreign prince. Patrick, a
broken-hearted proxy, successfully begs her family for a miniature of the
girl to take back to his brother, but he falls so deeply in love with her
on seeing the portrait that his loyalty to Philip almost wavers, when the
latter carelessly asks him to leave the miniature on a more or less public
table instead of taking it off to the solitude of his own room for a long
vigil of adoration.

In the rest of the story we have an account of the brothers in the London
house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of
mechanical propriety--a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable
atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the
friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, while at the same time
full of grotesque and whimsical criticisms of all those things, Saxon and
more widely human, for which she stands. There is a touch of farce in the
relations of these two, aptly symbolized by the bell which rings for
Captain Con, and hastens him away from his midnight eloquence with Patrick
and Philip. "He groaned, 'I must go. I haven't heard the tinkler for
months. It signifies she's cold in her bed. The thing called circulation
is unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I'm the
warming-pan, as legitimately as I should be, I'm her husband and her
Harvey in one.'"

It is in the house of Captain Con, it should be added, that Philip and
Patrick meet Jane Mattock, the Saxon woman; and the story as we have it
ends with Philip invalided home from service in India,