if my
interest lay in killing her! Had my boy lived, it would have been a
different thing; he and his mother might have cut off the entail of a
good part of the property between them, and my affairs have been put in
better order. Now they were in a bad condition indeed. All my schemes
had turned out failures; my lands, which I had purchased with borrowed
money, made me no return, and I was obliged to pay ruinous interest for
the sums with which I had purchased them. My income, though very large,
was saddled with hundreds of annuities, and thousands of lawyers'
charges; and I felt the net drawing closer and closer round me, and no
means to extricate myself from its toils.

To add to all my perplexities, two years after my poor child's death, my
wife, whose vagaries of temper and wayward follies I had borne with for
twelve years, wanted to leave me, and absolutely made attempts at what
she called escaping from my tyranny.

My mother, who was the only person that, in my misfortunes, remained
faithful to me (indeed, she has always spoken of me in my true light, as
a martyr to the rascality of others and a victim of my own generous and
confiding temper), found out the first scheme that was going on; and
of which those artful and malicious Tiptoffs were, as usual, the main
promoters. Mrs. Barry, indeed, though her temper was violent and her
ways singular, was an invaluable person to me in my house; which would
have been at rack and ruin long before, but for her spirit of order
and management, and for her excellent economy in the government of my
numerous family. As for my Lady Lyndon, she, poor soul! was much too
fine a lady to attend to household matters--passed her days with her
doctor, or her books of piety, and never appeared among us except at my
compulsion; when she and my mother would be sure to have a quarrel.

Mrs. Barry, on the contrary, had a talent for management in all matters.
She kept the maids stirring, and the footmen to their duty; had an eye
over the claret in the cellar, and the oats and hay in the stable; saw
to the salting and pickling, the potatoes and the turf-stacking, the
pig-killing and the poultry, the linen-room and the bakehouse, and the
ten thousand minutiae of a great establishment. If all Irish housewives
were like her, I warrant many a hall-fire would be blazing where the
cobwebs only grow now, and many a park covered with sheep and fat cattle
where the thistles are at present the chief occ