e persons each morning
and evening to open and shut it; the remainder of the day it lay pensively
open; the steps which led to it were broken and falling; and the whole
aspect of things without was ruinous in the extreme. Within, matters were
somewhat better, for though the furniture was old, and none of it clean,
yet an appearance of comfort was evident; and the large grate, blazing with
its pile of red-hot turf, the deep-cushioned chairs, the old black mahogany
dinner-table, and the soft carpet, albeit deep with dust, were not to be
despised on a winter's evening, after a hard day's run with the "Blazers."
Here it was, however, that Mr. Philip Blake had dispensed his hospitalities
for above fifty years, and his father before him; and here, with a retinue
of servants as _gauches_ and ill-ordered as all about them, was he
accustomed to invite all that the county possessed of rank and wealth,
among which the officers quartered in his neighborhood were never
neglected, the Miss Blakes having as decided a taste for the army as any
young ladies of the west of Ireland; and while the Galway squire, with
his cords and tops, was detailing the latest news from Ballinasloe in one
corner, the dandy from St. James's Street might be seen displaying more
arts of seductive flattery in another than his most accurate _insouciane_
would permit him to practise in the elegant salons of London or Paris, and
the same man who would have "cut his brother," for a solecism of dress or
equipage, in Bond Street, was now to be seen quietly domesticated, eating
family dinners, rolling silk for the young ladies, going down the middle
in a country dance, and even descending to the indignity of long whist at
"tenpenny" points, with only the miserable consolation that the company
were not honest.

It was upon a clear frosty morning, when a bright blue sky and a sharp but
bracing air seem to exercise upon the feelings a sense no less pleasurable
than the balmiest breeze and warmest sun of summer, that I whipped my
leader short round, and entered the precincts of "Gurt-na-Morra." As I
proceeded along the avenue, I was struck by the slight traces of repairs
here and there evident,--a gate or two that formerly had been parallel to
the horizon had been raised to the perpendicular; some ineffectual efforts
at paint were also perceptible upon the palings; and, in short, everything
seemed to have undergone a kind of attempt at improvement.

When I reached the d