decent, relapsing, at an early age
into a relation irregular, but so domestic as to be respectable, with a
woman named Brigit Joyce who kept house for him and cooked potatoes and
distilled potheen as well as any female in the district. I do not know
if they had many children. If they did, it is probable that these found
their vocation in collecting spiders in the stables, or even drifted back
into the hill community from which their mother had come.

Through all his dissipations Sir Jocelyn preserved one characteristic, an
unerring instinct for field-sports that no amount of drinking could
impair. He could hit a flying bird with a stone, was a deadly shot for
snipe or mallard, rode like a centaur, and fished with the instinct of a
heron. It is probable that his consciousness of this faculty was at the
bottom of his startling recovery. Possibly he was frightened to find a
little of his skill failing. I only know that at the age of forty-eight,
he pulled himself up short. His eyes, seeing clearly for the first time
in his life, became aware of the appalling ruin into which Roscarna had
fallen. He became sober for six days out of the seven, setting aside the
Sabbath for the worship of Bacchus, and during the remainder he devoted
himself seriously, steadily to the reclamation of his estate. He
repaired the roof of the house with new blue slates, cleared the attics
of owls and the chimneys of jackdaws; he dredged the river and discovered
the marble bottom, netted the pike and put down yearling trout.
Gradually he restored Roscarna to its old position as a first-class
sporting property; and so, having fought his way back, step by step, into
the company of decent men, he married a wife.

Hardly the wife one would have expected from a Hewish, it is true. Her
name was Parker, her father was a shop-keeper in Baggot Street, Dublin,
and how Hewish met her God only knows. She was a sober, plain-sailing
Englishwoman, a Protestant, with a religious bias that may have made the
reformation of a dissolute baronet attractive to her. She had a little
money, to which she stuck like glue, and an abundance of common-sense.
It speaks well for the latter that she appreciated, from the first, the
value of Biddy Joyce in the kitchen, and kept her there, boiling
potatoes, although she knew that she had been her husband's mistress.
Firmly, but certainly, she ordered Jocelyn's life, realising, with him,
that Roscarna was worth saving, su