ith the gentry; and thus I stood between both, unknown to
either.

For a while my new career was too absorbing to suffer me to dwell on
this circumstance. The excitement of field-sports sufficed me when
abroad, and I came home usually so tired at night that I could
barely keep awake to amuse Uncle Pat with those narratives of war and
campaigning he was so fond of hearing. To the hunting-field succeeded
the Bay of Dublin, and I passed days, even weeks, exploring every creek
and inlet of the coast--now cruising under the dark cliffs of the Welsh
shore, or, while my boat lay at anchor, wandering among the solitary
valleys of Lambay, my life, like a dream full of its own imaginings, and
unbroken by the thoughts or feelings of others! I will not go the length
of saying that I was self-free from all reproach on the inglorious
indolence in which my days were passed, or that my thoughts never
strayed away to that land where my first dreams of ambition were felt.
But a strange fatuous kind of languor had grown upon me, and the more I
retired within myself, the less did I wish for a return to that struggle
with the world which every active life engenders. Perhaps--I cannot now
say if it were so--perhaps I resented the disdainful distance with
which the gentry treated me, as we met in the hunting-field or the
coursing-ground. Some of the isolation I preferred may have had this
origin, but choice had the greater share in it, until at last my
greatest pleasure was to absent myself for weeks on a cruise, fancying
that I was exploring tracts never visited by man, and landing on spots
where no human foot had ever been known to tread.

If Uncle Pat would occasionally remonstrate on the score of these long
absences, he never ceased to supply means for them; and my sea-store and
a well-filled purse were never wanting, when the blue-peter floated from
_La Hoche_, as in my ardour I had named my cutter. Perhaps at heart
he was not sorry to see me avoid the capital and its society. The
bitterness which had succeeded the struggle for independence was now at
its highest point, and there was what, to my thinking at least, appeared
something like the cruelty of revenge in the sentences which followed
the state trials. I will not suffer myself to stray into the debatable
ground of politics, nor dare I give an opinion on matters, where, with
all the experience of fifty years superadded, the wisest heads are
puzzled how to decide; but my impression