ures over there; you might raise a
famous breed. The air is fine; it would suit our English stock. We are
on ground, Mr. O'Donnell, which my forefathers contested sharply and did
not yield.'

'The owners of the soil had to do that,' said Patrick. 'I can show the
same in my country, with a difference.'

'Considerably to your benefit.'

'Everything has been crushed there barring the contrary opinion.'

'I could expect such a remark from a rebel.'

'I'm only interpreting the people, sir.'

'Jump out of that tinder-box as soon as you can.'

'When I was in South America, it astonished me that no Englishman had
cast an eye on so inviting a land. Australia is not comparable with
it. And where colonisations have begun without system, and without hard
fighting to teach the settlers to value good leadership and respect
their chiefs, they tumble into Republics.'

Patrick would have liked to fling a word in about the Englishman's cast
of his eye upon inviting lands, but the trot was resumed, the lord of
Earlsfont having delivered his mind, and a minute made it happily too
late for the sarcastic bolt. Glad that his tongue had been kept from
wagging, he trotted along beside his host in the dusky evening over the
once contested land where the gentleman's forefathers had done their
deeds and firmly fixed their descendants. A remainder of dull red fire
prolonged the half-day above the mountain strongholds of the former
owners of the soil, upon which prince and bard and priest, and
grappling natives never wanting for fierceness, roared to-arms in the
beacon-flames from ridge to peak: and down they poured, and back they
were pushed by the inveterate coloniser--stationing at threatened points
his old 'artillerymen' of those days and so it ends, that bard and
priest and prince; holy poetry, and divine prescription, and a righteous
holding; are as naught against him. They go, like yonder embers of the
winter sunset before advancing night: and to morrow the beacon-heaps
are ashes, the conqueror's foot stamps on them, the wind scatters them;
strangest of all, you hear victorious lawlessness appealing solemnly to
God the law.

Patrick was too young to philosophise upon his ideas; or else the series
of pictures projected by the troops of sensations running through
him were not of a solidity to support any structure of philosophy. He
reverted, though rather in name than in spirit, to the abstractions,
justice, consistency, right. They