all uneasiness; but he is just that thing now that brings all the
misery on us in Ireland. He thinks he's a gentleman because he can do
nothing; and to save himself from the disgrace of incapacity, 'he'd like to
be a rebel.'

If Mr. Tom McKeown's reasonings were at times somewhat abstruse and hard of
comprehension to his friend Kearney, it was not that he did not bestow
on them due thought and reflection; and over this private and strictly
confidential page he had now meditated for hours.

'Bad luck to me,' cried he at last, 'if I see what he's at. If I'm to tell
the boy he is ruined to-day, and to-morrow to announce to him that he is a
lord--if I'm to threaten him now with poverty, and the morning after I'm to
send him to Halle, or Hell, or wherever it is--I'll soon be out of my mind
myself through bare confusion. As to having him "down," he's low enough;
but so shall I be too, if I keep him there. I'm not used to seeing my house
uncomfortable, and I cannot bear it.'

Such were some of his reflections, over his agent's advice; and it may be
imagined that the Machiavellian Mr. McKeown had fallen upon a very inapt
pupil.

It must be owned that Mathew Kearney was somewhat out of temper with his
son even before the arrival of this letter. While the 'swells,' as he would
persist in calling the two English visitors, were there, Dick took no
trouble about them, nor to all seeming made any impression on them. As
Mathew said, 'He let Joe Atlee make all the running, and, signs on it! Joe
Atlee was taken off to town as Walpole's companion, and Dick not so much as
thought of. Joe, too, did the honours of the house as if it was his own,
and talked to Lockwood about coming down for the partridge-shooting as if
he was the head of the family. The fellow was a bad lot, and McKeown was
right so far--the less Dick saw of him the better.'

The trouble and distress these reflections, and others like them, cost him
would more than have recompensed Dick, had he been hard-hearted enough to
desire a vengeance. 'For a quarter of an hour, or maybe twenty minutes,'
said he, 'I can be as angry as any man in Europe, and, if it was required
of me during that time to do anything desperate--downright wicked--I could
be bound to do it; and what's more, I'd stand to it afterwards if it cost
me the gallows. But as for keeping up the same mind, as for being able to
say to myself my heart is as hard as ever, I'm just as much bent on cruelty
as I was y