ding-crop; its cane end was capped
with heavy gold. The spurs I also lifted for inspection; they were
beautifully wrought in silver.

Faugh! Here was no poverty, but the shiftlessness of a sot, trampling
good things into the mire!

I looked into the fireplace. Ashes of dead embers choked it; the
andirons, smoke-smeared and crusted, stood out stark against the sooty
maw of the hearth.

Still, for all, the hall was made in good and even noble proportion;
simple, as should be the abode of a gentleman; over-massive, perhaps,
and even destitute of those gracious and symmetrical galleries which we
of the South think no shame to take pride in; for the banisters were
brutally heavy, and the rail above like a rampart, and for a newel-post
some ass had set a bronze cannon, breech upward; and it was green and
beautiful, but offensive to sane consistency.

Standing, the better to observe the hall on all sides, it came to me
that some one had stripped a fine English mansion of fine but ancient
furniture, to bring it across an ocean and through a forest for the
embellishment of this coarse house. For there were pictures in frames
showing generals and statesmen of the Ormond-Butlers, one even of the
great duke who fled to France; and there were pictures of the Varicks
before they mingled with us Irish--apple-cheeked Dutchmen, cadaverous
youths bearing match-locks, and one, an admiral, with star and sash
across his varnish-cracked corselet of blue steel, looking at me with
pale, smoky eyes.

Rusted suits of mail, and groups of weapons made into star shapes and
circles, points outward, were ranged between the heavy pictures, each
centred with a moth-ravaged stag's head, smothered in dust.

As I slowly paced the panelled wall, nose in air to observe these
neglected trophies, I came to another picture, hung all alone near the
wall where it passes under the staircase, and at first, for the
darkness, I could not see.

Imperceptibly the outlines of the shape grew in the gloom from a deep,
rich background, and I made out a figure of a youth all cased in armor
save for the helmet, which was borne in one smooth, blue-veined hand.

The face, too, began to assume form; rounded, delicate, crowned with a
mass of golden hair; and suddenly I perceived the eyes, and they seemed
to open sweetly, like violets in a dim wood.

"What Ormond is this?" I muttered, bewitched, yet sullen to see such
feminine roundness in any youth; and, with my slee