sabel, the
elder, was a gentle and beautiful girl, very delicate, very timid, and
most sweet when most submissive, like the woodland herbs which give out
their sweetest fragrance when they are trodden on and crushed. Bridget,
the younger, was rather homely, rather common, proud of her strength of
mind and will.

To the deep chagrin of the younger sister, my father selected the elder
one. I have never heard that my mother's wishes were consulted. Her
father and my father dealt with the marriage as a question of business,
and that was an end of the matter. On the wedding day my father did two
things that were highly significant. He signed the parish register in
the name of Daniel O'Neill by right of Letters Patent; and on taking his
bride back to her early home, he hoisted over the tower of his chill
grey house the stars and stripes of his once adopted country stitched to
the flag of his native island. He had talked less than "Neale the Lord,"
but he had thought and acted more.

Two years passed without offspring, and my father made no disguise of
his disappointment, which almost amounted to disgust. Hitherto he had
occupied himself with improvements in his house and estate, but now his
restless energies required a wider field, and he began to look about
him. Ellan was then a primitive place, and its inhabitants, half
landsmen, half seamen, were a simple pious race living in a sweet
poverty which rarely descended into want. But my father had magnificent
schemes for it. By push, energy and enterprise he would galvanise the
island into new life, build hotels, theatres, casinos, drinking halls
and dancing palaces, lay out race-courses, construct electric railways
to the tops of the mountains, and otherwise transform the place into a
holiday resort for the people of the United Kingdom.

"We'll just sail in and make this old island hum," he said, and a number
of his neighbours, nothing loth to be made rich by magic--advocates,
bankers and insular councillors--joined hands with him in his
adventurous schemes.

But hardly had he begun when a startling incident happened. The old Lord
Raa of Castle Raa, head of the O'Neills, the same that had sworn at my
grandmother, after many years in which he had lived a bad life abroad
where he had contracted fatal maladies, returned to Ellan to die. Being
a bachelor, his heir would have been Captain O'Neill, but my mother's
father had died during the previous winter, and in the absence of