pleasanter course, of submitting one of his
own brief notes to Roland Cashel, written some three days after his
arrival at Tubbermore:--

"Still here, my dear Cashel, still in this Tipperary
Siberia, where our devotion to your service has called and
still retains us,--and what difficulties and dangers have
been ours! What a land!--and what a people! Of a truth, I
no longer envy the rich, landed proprietor, as, in my
ignorance, I used to do some weeks back. To begin: Your
Chateau de Tubbermore, which seems a cross between a jail
and a county hospital without, and is a downright ruin
within, stands in a park of thistles and docks whose
luxuriant growth are a contemptuous reflection upon your
trees, which positively don't grow at all. So ingeniously
placed is this desirable residence, that although the
country, the river, and the mountains, offer some fine
landscape effects, not a vestige of any of them can be seen
from your windows. Your dining-room, late a nursery for an
interesting family of small pigs, looks out upon the
stables, picturesque as they are in fissured walls and
tumbling rafters; and one of the drawing-rooms--they call
it the blue room, a tint so likely to be caught up by the
spectators--opens upon a garden,--but what a garden! Fruit-
trees, there are none--stay, I am unjust, two have been left
standing to give support to a clothes-line, where the
amiable household of your care-taker, Mr. Cane, are
pictorially represented by various garments, crescendo from
the tunic of tender years to the full-grown 'toga.' But why
enumerate small details? Let me rather deal in negatives,
and tell you there is not a whole pane of glass in the
entire building, not a grate, few doors, little flooring,
and actually no roof. The slates, where there are such, are
so loose that the wind rattles among them like the keys of a
gigantic piano, and usually ends with a grand Freischutz
effect, which uncovers a room or two. The walls are
everywhere so rotten, that if you would break a loop-hole,
you throw down enough to drive a 'break' through; and as
for the chimneys, the jackdaw may plead the Statute of
Limitations, and defy to surrender a possession which
certainly dates from the past century! Perystell is in
despair; he goes about sticking