monologue.

"--We are all played out, that is the fact--the soil is exhausted--we
want a great national upheaval--a new condition of things--a social
revolution, in short. And we're going to get it" he continued, in a sort
of triumphant way; "there's no mistake about that; the social revolution
is in the air, it is under our feet, it is pressing in upon us from
every side; and yet at the very moment that the aristocracy have got
notice to quit their deer-forests and their salmon-rivers and
grouse-moors, they so far mistake the signs of the times that they think
they should be devoting themselves to art and going on the stage! Was
there ever such incomprehensible madness?"

"I hope they won't sweep away deer-forests and grouse-moors just all at
once," the young baritone said, modestly, "for I am asked to go to the
Highlands at the beginning of next August."

"Make haste, then, and see the last of these doomed institutions"
observed Mr. Quirk, with dark significance, as he looked up from his
steak and onions. "I tell you deer-forests are doomed; grouse-moors are
doomed; salmon-rivers are doomed. They are a survival of feudal rights
and privileges which the new democracy--the new ruling power--will make
short work of. The time has gone by for all these absurd restrictions
and reservations! There is no defence for them; there never was; they
were conceived in an iniquity of logic which modern common-sense will no
longer suffer. _Bona vacantia_ can't belong to anybody--therefore
they belong to the king; that's a pretty piece of reasoning, isn't it?
And if the crofter or the laborer says, '_Bona vacantia_ can't
belong to anybody--therefore they belong to me'--isn't the reasoning as
good? But it is not merely game-laws that must be abolished, it is game
itself."

"If you abolish the one, you'll soon get rid of the other," Maurice
Mangan said, with a kind of half-contemptuous indifference; he was
examining this person in a curious way, as he might have looked through
the wires of a cage in the Zoological Gardens.

"Both must be abolished," Mr. Octavius Quirk continued, with windy
vehemence. "The very distinction that takes any animal _ferae
naturae_ and constitutes it game is a relic of class privilege and
must go--"

"Then Irish landlords will no longer be considered _ferae naturae_?"
Mangan asked, incidentally.

"We must be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediaeval chains and
manacles that the Norman kings i