almost rebuilt--so far at least as the size
and the arrangement of them were concerned. The vast saloons were
partitioned off into 'apartments' containing three or four rooms each.
The broad corridors in the upper regions afforded spare space enough
for rows of little bedchambers, devoted to servants and to travellers
with limited means. Nothing was spared but the solid floors and the
finely-carved ceilings. These last, in excellent preservation as to
workmanship, merely required cleaning, and regilding here and there, to
add greatly to the beauty and importance of the best rooms in the
hotel. The only exception to the complete re-organization of the
interior was at one extremity of the edifice, on the first and second
floors. Here there happened, in each case, to be rooms of such
comparatively moderate size, and so attractively decorated, that the
architect suggested leaving them as they were. It was afterwards
discovered that these were no other than the apartments formerly
occupied by Lord Montbarry (on the first floor), and by Baron Rivar (on
the second). The room in which Montbarry had died was still fitted up
as a bedroom, and was now distinguished as Number Fourteen. The room
above it, in which the Baron had slept, took its place on the
hotel-register as Number Thirty-Eight. With the ornaments on the walls
and ceilings cleaned and brightened up, and with the heavy
old-fashioned beds, chairs, and tables replaced by bright, pretty, and
luxurious modern furniture, these two promised to be at once the most
attractive and the most comfortable bedchambers in the hotel. As for
the once-desolate and disused ground floor of the building, it was now
transformed, by means of splendid dining-rooms, reception-rooms,
billiard-rooms, and smoking-rooms, into a palace by itself. Even the
dungeon-like vaults beneath, now lighted and ventilated on the most
approved modern plan, had been turned as if by magic into kitchens,
servants' offices, ice-rooms, and wine cellars, worthy of the splendour
of the grandest hotel in Italy, in the now bygone period of seventeen
years since.

Passing from the lapse of the summer months at Venice, to the lapse of
the summer months in Ireland, it is next to be recorded that Mrs.
Rolland obtained the situation of attendant on the invalid Mrs.
Carbury; and that the fair Miss Haldane, like a female Caesar, came,
saw, and conquered, on her first day's visit to the new Lord
Montbarry's house.

The lad