u all! who knows your tactics
well, and can expound your 'aristocratic prejudices better than ever a
Quaker of them all!'--Not but," said he, after a pause, "another line
would satisfy me equally. The peerage, with such a fortune as this,
is no inordinate ambition; a few years in the House, of that dogged,
unmanageable conduct Englishmen call independence--a capriciousness in
voting--the repute of refusing office, and so on. There's no originality
in the thought, but it succeeds as well as if there were! Besides, if
hard pressed, I can be a Romanist, and, as times go, with every party;
that is a strong claim. And why not Lord Linton? I have no doubt"--and
he laughed as he spoke this--"there _is_ a peerage in the family
already, if I only knew where to look for it!

"And now, sufficient of speculation! to open the campaign!" So saying,
he descended the knoll and took the path which led to the cottage. As
he drew near the wicket, he saw a man lounging beside it, in all that
careless indifference which an Irish peasant can assume, and soon
perceived it was Tom Keane, the gatekeeper.

"Good-morrow, Tom; how comes it you are up here so early?"

"'T is in throuble I am, your honer," said he, taking off his hat, and
putting on that supplicating look so characteristic of his class. "The
master's going to turn me out of the little place beyant."

"What for?"

"For nothing at all, your honer: that's just it; but ould Kennyfeck put
him up to it."

"Up to what? That seems the whole question."

"Your honer may remimber, that when you came here first, the cattle of
the neighbors was used to come and pick a mouthful of grass,--and poor
grass it was,--bekase there was no way of keeping them out. Well, when
the master came down, and all the people, by coorse the cows and pigs
couldn't be let in as afore; for, as the agint said, it was a disgrace
to see them under the nose of the quality, running about as if it was
Donnybrook fair! 'Don't let them appear here again, Tom Keane,' says he,
'or it will be worse for you.' And sorra one ever I let in since that,
till it was dark night. But ould Mr. Kennyfeck, the other evening, takes
it into his head to walk into the park, and comes right into a crowd
of two-year-old bulls, and did n't know a bit where he was, till a man
called out, 'Lie down on your face, for the love of the Virgin, or you
are a dead man! The bullsheens is comin'!' And down he lay, sure enough,
and hard work they had