x hundred as bad acres as a
gentleman might wish to call his own. But Thaddeus, otherwise Thady
Macdermot, being an estated gentleman, must have a gentleman's
residence on his estate, and the house of Ballycloran was accordingly
built. Had Thady Macdermot had ready money, it might have been well
built; but though an estated gentleman, he had none. He had debts
even when his father died; and though he planned, ordered, and agreed
for a house, such as he thought the descendant of a Connaught Prince
might inhabit without disgrace, it was ill built, half finished,
and paid for by long bills. This, however, is so customary in poor
Ireland that it but little harassed Thady. He had a fine, showy
house, with stables, &c., gardens, an avenue, and a walk round his
demesne; and his neighbours had no more. It was little he cared
for comfort, but he would not be the first of the Macdermots that
would not be respectable. When his house was finished, Thady went
into County Galway, and got himself a wife with two thousand pounds
fortune, for which he had to go to law with his brother-in-law. The
lawsuit, the continual necessity of renewing the bills with which
the builder in Carrick on Shannon every quarter attacked him, the
fruitless endeavour to make his tenants pay thirty shillings an acre
for half-reclaimed bog, and a somewhat strongly developed aptitude
for potheen, sent poor Thady to another world rather prematurely,
and his son and heir, Lawrence, came to the throne at the tender age
of twelve. The Galway brother-in-law compromised the lawsuit; the
builder took a mortgage on the property from the boy's guardian;
the mother gave new leases to the tenants; Larry went to school at
Longford; and Mrs. Mac kept up the glory of Ballycloran.

At the age of twenty, Lawrence, or Larry, married a Milesian damsel,
portionless, but of true descent. The builder from Carrick had made
overtures about a daughter he had at home, and offered poor Larry
his own house, as her fortune. But the blood of the Macdermots
could not mix with the lime and water that flowed in a builder's
veins; he therefore made an enemy where he most wanted a friend, and
brought his wife home to live with his mother. In order that we may
quickly rid ourselves of encumbrances, it may be as well to say that
during the next twenty-five years his mother and wife died; he had
christened his only son Thaddeus, after his grandfather, and his only
daughter had been christened Eup