them go their
"opposite numbers" (to borrow an army term) from chieftainess to cook.
Chieftainesses are there unmistakably. One ex-beauty had retired from
the Court of the Regent to Castle Townshend (Miss Somerville's personal
background), and there lived long, "noted for her charm of manner, her
culture and her sense of humour."

Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a
relative, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the
churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the coffin.
She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire and struck
the countryman in the face.

Miss Somerville observes that such stories may help to explain the
French Revolution; but she adds, quite plausibly:--

It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman's
attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable
that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life,
that old Madam---- had "bet him in a blow in the face."

Undoubtedly the chieftain-spirit is admired, and not least when it shows
itself in a woman. A more lenient and more modern example is to be found
in the account of a dispute about bounds in a transaction under the Land
Purchase Act. After all other agencies failed, the landlord's sister
called the disputants before her to the disputed spot, stepped the
distance of the land debatable, drove her walking-stick into a crevice
of the rock (disputes are passionate in opposite ratio to the value of
the land) and, collecting stones, built a small cairn round it. "Now
men," she said, "in the name of God let this be the bounds." And it was
so. "It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the
priest; but Lady Mary settled it," was the summing up of one of the
disputants. That was a chieftainess for you.

Not inferior in chieftainly spirit was Martin Ross's grandfather who
"had the family liking for a horse."

It is recorded that in a dealer's yard in Dublin he mounted a
refractory animal, in his frock-coat and tall hat, and took him
round St. Stephen's Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying
into him with his umbrella.

Somehow that picture gives a measure of the remoteness. Stephen's Green
was not then a place of square-set granite pavement, tram-rails and
large swift-moving electric trams; it was a leisurely promenade where
large slow-moving country gentleme