n named
Kildoon, and in that neighbourhood I was to remain, making certain
inquiries as to the existence of any descendants of the younger branch
of a family to whom some valuable estates had descended in the female
line. The Irish lawyer whom I had seen was weary of the case, and would
willingly have given up the property, without further ado, to a man who
appeared to claim them; but on laying his tables and trees before my
uncle, the latter had foreseen so many possible prior claimants, that
the lawyer had begged him to undertake the management of the whole
business. In his youth, my uncle would have liked nothing better than
going over to Ireland himself, and ferreting out every scrap of paper
or parchment, and every word of tradition respecting the family. As it
was, old and gouty, he deputed me.

Accordingly, I went to Kildoon. I suspect I had something of my uncle's
delight in following up a genealogical scent, for I very soon found
out, when on the spot, that Mr. Rooney, the Irish lawyer, would have
got both himself and the first claimant into a terrible scrape, if he
had pronounced his opinion that the estates ought to be given up to
him. There were three poor Irish fellows, each nearer of kin to the
last possessor; but, a generation before, there was a still nearer
relation, who had never been accounted for, nor his existence ever
discovered by the lawyers, I venture to think, till I routed him out
from the memory of some of the old dependants of the family. What had
become of him? I travelled backwards and forwards; I crossed over to
France, and came back again with a slight clue, which ended in my
discovering that, wild and dissipated himself, he had left one child, a
son, of yet worse character than his father; that this same Hugh
Fitzgerald had married a very beautiful serving-woman of the Byrnes--a
person below him in hereditary rank, but above him in character; that
he had died soon after his marriage, leaving one child, whether a boy
or a girl I could not learn, and that the mother had returned to live
in the family of the Byrnes. Now, the chief of this latter family was
serving in the Duke of Berwick's regiment, and it was long before I
could hear from him; it was more than a year before I got a short,
haughty letter--I fancy he had a soldier's contempt for a civilian, an
Irishman's hatred for an Englishman, an exiled Jacobite's jealousy of
one who prospered and lived tranquilly under the government he