they are. The views of the bridge, of the
towers, and of the river, from this slope would make the fortune of the
place in a land of peace and order.

A most original and delightful lady of the country lunched with
us,--such a character as Miss Edgeworth or Miss Austen might have drawn.
Shrewd, humorous, sensible, fearless, and ready with impartial hand to
box the ears alike of Trojan and of Tyrian. She not only sees both sides
of the question in Ireland as between the landlords and the tenants, but
takes both sides of the question. She holds lands by inheritance, which
make her keenly alive to the wrongs of the landlords, and she holds
farms as a tenant, which make her implacably critical as to their
claims. She mercilessly demolished in one capacity whatever she advanced
in the other, and all with the most perfect nonchalance and good faith.
This curiously dual attitude reminded me of the confederate General,
Braxton Bragg, of whom his comrades in the old army of the United States
used to say that he once had a very sharp official correspondence with
himself. He happened to hold a staff appointment, being also a line
officer. So in his quality of a staff officer, he found fault with
himself in his capacity as a line officer, reprimanded himself sharply,
replied defiantly to the reprimand, and eventually reported himself to
himself for discipline at head-quarters. She told an excellent story of
a near kinsman of hers who, holding a very good living in the Protestant
Irish Church, came rather unexpectedly by inheritance into a baronetcy,
upon which his women-folk insisted that it would be derogatory to a
baronet to be a parson. "Would you believe it, the poor man was silly
enough to listen to their cackle, and resign seven hundred a year!"

"That didn't clear him," I said, "of the cloth, did it?"

"Not a bit, of course, poor foolish man. He was just as much a parson as
ever, only without a parsonage. Men are fools enough of themselves,
don't you think, without needing to listen to women?"

Mr. Seigne comes of a French Protestant stock long ago planted in
Ireland, and his Gallic blood doubtless helps him to handle the
practical problems daily submitted in these days to an Irish
land-agent--problems very different, as he thinks, from those with which
an Irish agent had to deal in the days before 1870. The Irish tenant has
a vantage-ground now in his relations with his landlord which he never
had in the olden time, and