, and can only be
explained as the expiring cry of the English blood. How many
Anglo-Irish great-great-grandfathers have not raised these monuments
to their English forbears, and then, recognising their obligations to
their Irish mothers' ancestry, have filled them, gloriously, with
horses and hounds, and butts of claret, and hungry poor relations unto
the fourth and fifth generations? That they were a puissant breed, the
history of the Empire, in which they have so staunchly borne their
parts, can tell; their own point of view is fairly accurately summed
up in Curran's verse:--

"If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,
Could more than drinking my cares compose,
A cure for sorrow from sighs I'd borrow,
And hope to-morrow would end my woes.
But as in wailing there's nought availing,
And Death unfailing will strike the blow,
Then for that reason, and for a season,
Let us be merry before we go."

For Dick Talbot-Lowry, however, and many another like him, the
merriment of his great-grandfather was indifferent compensation for
the fact that his grandfather's and his father's consequent borrowings
were by no means limited to cures for sorrow. Mortgages, charges,
younger children (superfluous and abhorrent to the Heaven-selected
Head of a Family)--all these had driven wedges deep into the Mount
Music estate. But, fortunately, a good-looking, long-legged, ex-Hussar
need not rely exclusively on his patrimony, while matrimony is still
within the sphere of practical politics. When, at close on forty-one
years of age (and looking no more than thirty), Dick left the Army,
his next step was to make what was universally conceded to be "a very
nice marriage," and on the whole, regarding it from the impartial
standpoint of Posterity, the universe may be said to have been
justified in its opinion.

Lady Isabel Christian was the daughter of an English Earl, and she
brought with her to Mount Music twenty thousand golden sovereigns,
which are very nice things, and Lady Isabel herself was indisputably a
nice thing too. She was tall and fair, and quite pretty enough (as
Dick's female relatives said, non-committally). She was sufficiently
musical to play the organ in church (which is also a statement
provided with an ample margin); she was a docile and devoted wife, a
futile and extravagant house-keeper, kindly and unpunctual, prolific
without resentment; she regarded with mild surprise the large and
strenuous f