Christian's father, Richard Talbot-Lowry, was a good-looking,
long-legged, long-moustached Major, who, conforming beautifully to
type, was a soldier, sportsman, and loyalist, as had been his
ancestors before him. He had fought in the Mutiny as a lad of
nineteen, and had been wounded in the thigh in a cavalry charge in a
subsequent fight on the Afghan Frontier. Dick, like Horatius, "halted
upon one knee" for the rest of his life, but since the injury gave him
no trouble in the saddle, and did not affect the sit of his trousers,
he did not resent it, and possibly enjoyed its occasional exposition
to an enquirer. When his father died, he left the Army, and, still
true to the family traditions, proceeded to "settle down" at Mount
Music, and to take into his own hands the management of the property.

Of the Talbot-Lowrys it may be truly said that the lot had fallen to
them in a fair ground. Their ancestor, the Gentleman Adventurer of
Queen Elizabeth's time, had had the eye for the country that, in a
slightly different sense, had descended to his present representative.
Mount Music House stood about midway of a long valley, on a level
plateau of the hill from which it took its name, Cnocan an Ceoil
Sidhe, which means the Hill of Fairy Music, and may, approximately, be
pronounced "Knockawn an K'yole Shee." The hill melted downwards--no
other word can express the velvet softness of those mild, grassy
slopes--to the shore of the River Broadwater, a slow and lordly
stream, that moved mightily down the wide valley, became merged for a
space in Lough Kieraun, and thence flowed onwards, broad and brimming,
bearded with rushes, passing like a king, cloaked in the splendours of
the sunset, to its suicide in the far-away Atlantic. The demesne of
Mount Music lay along its banks; in woods often, more often in
pastures; with boggy places ringed with willows, lovely, in their
seasons, with yellow flags, and meadowsweet, kingcups, ragwort and
loosestrife. Its western boundary was the Ownashee, a mountain stream,
a tributary of the great river, that came storming down from the
hills, and, in times of flood, snatching, like a border-reiver, at
sheep, and pigs, and fowl, tossing its spoils in a tumble of racing
waves into the wide waters of its chieftain.

Mount Music House was large, intensely solid, practical, sensible, of
that special type of old Irish country-house that is entirely remote
from the character of the men that originated it