te had determined
that I should leave none of my race behind me, and ordained that I
should finish my career, as I see it closing now--poor, lonely, and
childless. I may have had my faults; but no man shall dare to say of me
that I was not a good and tender father. I loved that boy passionately;
perhaps with a blind partiality: I denied him nothing. Gladly, gladly,
I swear, would I have died that his premature doom might have been
averted. I think there is not a day since I lost him but his bright face
and beautiful smiles look down on me out of heaven, where he is, and
that my heart does not yearn towards him. That sweet child was taken
from me at the age of nine years, when he was full of beauty and
promise: and so powerful is the hold his memory has of me that I have
never been able to forget him; his little spirit haunts me of nights
on my restless solitary pillow; many a time, in the wildest and maddest
company, as the bottle is going round, and the song and laugh roaring
about, I am thinking of him. I have got a lock of his soft brown hair
hanging round my breast now: it will accompany me to the dishonoured
pauper's grave; where soon, no doubt, Barry Lyndon's worn-out old bones
will be laid.

My Bryan was a boy of amazing high spirit (indeed how, coming from such
a stock, could he be otherwise?), impatient even of my control, against
which the dear little rogue would often rebel gallantly; how much more,
then, of his mother's and the women's, whose attempts to direct him he
would laugh to scorn. Even my own mother ('Mrs. Barry of Lyndon' the
good soul now called herself, in compliment to my new family) was quite
unable to check him; and hence you may fancy what a will he had of his
own. If it had not been for that, he might have lived to this day: he
might--but why repine? Is he not in a better place? would the heritage
of a beggar do any service to him? It is best as it is--Heaven be good
to us!--Alas! that I, his father, should be left to deplore him.

It was in the month of October I had been to Dublin, in order to see a
lawyer and a moneyed man who had come over to Ireland to consult with me
about some sales of mine and the cut of Hackton timber; of which, as I
hated the place and was greatly in want of money, I was determined to
cut down every stick. There had been some difficulty in the matter. It
was said I had no right to touch the timber. The brute peasantry about
the estate had been roused to such a pit