ising, then, if he conceived many of his father's notions
obsolete and antiquated, and had they not been his, he would have
treated them as ridiculous.

This somewhat tedious explanation of a character with whom we have not
any very lengthened business hereafter, demands some apology from us,
still, without it we should be unable to explain to our reader the
reason of those events to whose narrative we are hastening.

On the table, among the materials of a yet untasted breakfast, lay an
open letter, of which, from time to time, the young man read, and as
often threw from him, with expressions of impatience and anger. A
night of more than ordinary dissipation had made him irritable, and the
contents of the epistle did not seem of a character to calm him.

"I knew it," said he at last, as he crushed the letter in his hand. "I
knew it, well; my poor father is unfit to cope with those savages; what
could ever have persuaded him to venture among them I know not! the few
hundreds a year the whole estate produces, are not worth as many weeks'
annoyance. Hemsworth knows them well; he is the only man fit to deal
with them. Heigho!" said he, with a sigh, "there is nothing for it
I suppose, but to bring them back again as soon as may be--and this
confounded accident Hemsworth has met with in the Highlands, will lay
him on his back these five weeks--I must e'en go myself. Yet nothing was
ever more ill-timed. The Queen's fete at Frogmore, fixed for Wednesday;
there's the tennis match on Friday,--and Saturday, the first day of the
Stag hounds. It is too bad. Hemsworth is greatly to blame; he should
have been candid about these people, and not have made his Pandemonium
an Arcadia. My father is also to blame; he might have asked my advice
about this trip; and Sybella, too--why didn't she write? She above all
should have warned me about the folly;" and thus did he accuse in
turn all the parties concerned in a calamity, which, after all, he saw
chiefly reflected in the inconvenience it caused himself.

Now, assuredly, Hemsworth requires some vindication at our hands. It had
never entered into that worthy man's most imaginative conceptions, to
believe a visit from Sir Marmaduke to his Irish property within the
reach of possibility; for although, as we have already said, he was in
the constant habit of entreating Sir Marmaduke to bestow this mark of
condescension on his Irish tenants, he ever contrived to accompany the
recommendation wi