cracksman;' nor will
a good stable of horses, and safe jocks 'bring a fellow round,' if he
hasn't it here." And he touched his forehead with his forefinger most
significantly.

Meanwhile Charles Conway sauntered slowly back to town, on the whole
somewhat a sadder man than he had left it in the morning. His friend
Jack had spoken much to him of his father and sister, and why or to
what extent he knew not, but somehow they did not respond to his own
self-drawn picture of them. Was it that he expected old Kellett would
have been a racier version of his son,--the same dashing, energetic
spirit,--seeing all for the best in life, and accepting even its
reverses in a half-jocular humor? Had he hoped to find in him Jack's
careless, easy temper,--a nature so brimful of content as to make all
around sharers in its own blessings; or had he fancied a "fine old Irish
gentleman" of that thoroughbred school he had so often heard of?

Nor was he less disappointed with Bella; he thought she had been
handsomer, or, at least, quite a different kind of beauty. Jack was
blue-eyed and Saxon-looking, and he fancied that she must be a "blonde,"
with the same frank, cheery expression of her brother; and he found her
dark-haired and dark-skinned, almost Spanish in her look,--the cast of
her features grave almost to sadness. She spoke, too, but little, and
never once reminded him, by a tone, a gesture, or a word, of his old
comrade.

Ah! how these self-created portraits do puzzle and disconcert us through
life! How they will obtrude themselves into the foreground, making
the real and the actual but mere shadows in the distance! What seeming
contradiction, too, do they create as often as we come into contact with
the true, and find it all so widely the reverse of what we dreamed of!
How often has the weary emigrant sighed over his own created promised
land in the midst of the silent forest or the desolate prairie! How has
the poor health-seeker sunk heavy-hearted amid scenes which, had he not
misconstrued them to himself, he had deemed a paradise!

These "phrenographs" are very dangerous paintings, and the more so that
we sketch them in unconsciously.

"Jack is the best of them; that's clear," said Conway, as he walked
along; and yet, with all his affection for him, the thought did not
bring the pleasure it ought to have done.

CHAPTER XV. A HOME SCENE

When Paul Kellett described Mr. Davenport Dunn's almost triumphal entry
into Dub