hile the
company was constantly augmented by others, mostly Irish, who stayed
there for several days. Among these was Mrs. Ronalds--one of the most
popular of the American ladies of London, who spent most of her autumn
with her daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, at Belfast. More kindly and
accomplished entertainers than Lord and Lady Roden it would not be easy
to imagine. Tullamore stands among great beech woods and gardens on one
side of a valley, at the bottom of which, half hidden by rhododendrons,
an amber-colored stream descends in waterfalls to the sea. The slopes
opposite to the house are thickly fledged with larches up to a certain
height, when they suddenly give place to the wildness of the Mourne
Mountains. The house externally is of more or less modern aspect, but
within, when I knew it, it was full of fine family portraits, books, and
old collections of china, together with certain other objects which
appealed to the sense of history rather than to that of art. The Rodens
having been among the chief of the Orange families of Ireland, a series
of cabinets which stood in a long gallery would be found on examination
to contain a collection of engraved wineglasses, each of which bore the
inscription "God save King William," or else "To Hell with the Pope." I
remember also that a number of fine Dutch mirrors, which were plainly
designed for ladies in the act of doing their hair, had been rendered
useless for this important purpose by the fact that the whole of their
surfaces were covered by delineations of King William on horseback,
gesticulating at the battle of the Boyne.

Such sketches of the country houses that have been known to me might be
very easily multiplied--houses of which, whenever I think of them,
memories come back to me like the voices of evening rooks. But these
will be sufficient, so far as England and Ireland are concerned, to
illustrate certain portions of my life other than that of London, and I
will for the moment turn from those portions to others, which were
spent by me for many years not at home, but abroad.

Not long after my Oxford career was ended, a family with which I was
closely connected was, in consequence of the illness of one of its
members, advised by doctors to pass the winter at Cannes, and, as soon
as my friends were settled there, I was asked to go out and join them. A
diminutive villa next to their own was secured for me. Its windows
opened on an equally diminutive garden, in which