hem at Ballinasloe; she supplied I don't
know how many towns with butter and bacon; and the fruit and vegetables
from the gardens of Castle Lyndon got the highest prices in Dublin
market. She had no waste in the kitchen, as there used to be in most of
our Irish houses; and there was no consumption of liquor in the cellars,
for the old lady drank water, and saw little or no company. All her
society was a couple of the girls of my ancient flame Nora Brady, now
Mrs. Quin; who with her husband had spent almost all their property,
and who came to see me once in London, looking very old, fat, and
slatternly, with two dirty children at her side. She wept very much when
she saw me, called me 'Sir,' and 'Mr. Lyndon,' at which I was not sorry,
and begged me to help her husband; which I did, getting him, through
my friend Lord Crabs, a place in the excise in Ireland, and paying the
passage of his family and himself to that country. I found him a dirty,
cast-down, snivelling drunkard; and, looking at poor Nora, could not but
wonder at the days when I had thought her a divinity. But if ever I have
had a regard for a woman, I remain through life her constant friend,
and could mention a thousand such instances of my generous and faithful
disposition.

Young Bullingdon, however, was almost the only person with whom she was
concerned that my mother could not keep in order. The accounts she sent
me of him at first were such as gave my paternal heart considerable
pain. He rejected all regularity and authority. He would absent himself
for weeks from the house on sporting or other expeditions. He was when
at home silent and queer, refusing to make my mother's game at piquet of
evenings, but plunging into all sorts of musty old books, with which he
muddled his brains; more at ease laughing and chatting with the
pipers and maids in the servants' hall, than with the gentry in the
drawing-room; always cutting jibes and jokes at Mrs. Barry, at which
she (who was rather a slow woman at repartee) would chafe violently: in
fact, leading a life of insubordination and scandal. And, to crown
all, the young scapegrace took to frequenting the society of the Romish
priest of the parish--a threadbare rogue, from some Popish seminary in
France or Spain--rather than the company of the vicar of Castle Lyndon,
a gentleman of Trinity, who kept his hounds and drank his two bottles a
day.

Regard for the lad's religion made me not hesitate then how I should act