ented of her family, but she did not know
how to use what God had given her, and therefore, abused it. Her
mother had died before she had grown up, and her grandmother had soon
followed her mother. Whatever her feelings were,--and for her mother
they were strong,--the real effect of this was, that she was freed
from the restraint and constant scolding of two stupid women at a
very early age; consequently she was left alone with her father
and her brother, neither of whom were at all fitting guides for so
wayward a pupil. By both she was loved more than any other living
creature; but their very love prevented them taking that care of her
they should have taken.

Her father had become almost like the tables and chairs in the
parlour, only much less useful and more difficult to move. What
little natural power he had ever had, could not be said to have been
impaired by age, for Lawrence Macdermot was not in years an old
man--he was not above fifty; but a total want of energy, joined to a
despairing apathy, had rendered him by this time little better than
an idiot.

Very soon after his coming to his property Flannelly had become a
daily and intolerant burthen to him. He had in his prime made some
ineffectual fight again this man,--he had made some faint attempts
rather to parry blows, than overcome his foe; but from the time that
Keegan's cunning had been added to Flannelly's weight, poor Lawrence
Macdermot had, as it were, owned himself thoroughly vanquished for
this world. Since that time he had done nothing but complain.

Joined to all this--and no wonder--he had taken to drink,--not
drinking in the would-be-jolly, rollicking, old Irish style, as
his father had done before him; but a slow, desperate, solitary,
continual melancholy kind of suction, which left him never drunk and
never sober. It had come to that, that if he were left throughout
the morning without his whiskey and water, he would cry like a child;
whatever power he had of endurance would leave him, and he would
sit over the fire whining the names of Flannelly and Keegan, and
slobbering over his wrongs and persecutions, till he had again drank
himself into silence and passive tolerance.

Not only his hair and his whiskers, but his very face had become grey
from the effect of the miserable, torpid life he led. He looked as if
he were degenerating into the grub even before he died.

The only visible feeling left to him was a kind of stupid family
pride,