gone?"

"I haven't asked them to stay; but unless they have stayed of their
own accord I have just shaken hands with them. It's all that one
gentleman can do to another when he meets him."

"Mr. Daly is talking of selling the hounds," said Frank Jones.

"Not quite yet, Tom," said Mr. Persse. "You mustn't do anything in a
hurry."

"They'll have to starve if they remain here," said the master of
hounds.

"I have come over here to say a word about them. I don't suppose this
kind of thing will last for ever, you know."

"Can you see any end to it?" said the other.

"Not as yet I can't, except that troubles when they come generally
do have an end. We always think that evils will last for ever,--and
blessings too. When two-year-old ewes went up to three pound ten at
Ballinasloe, we thought that we were to get that price for ever, but
they were soon down to two seventeen six; and when we had had two
years of the potato famine, we thought that there would never be
another potato in County Galway. For the last five years we've had
them as fine at Doneraile as ever I saw them. Nobody is ever quite
ruined, or quite has his fortune made."

"I am very near the ruin," said Tom Daly.

"I would struggle to hold on a little longer yet," said the other.
"How many horses have you got here and at Ahaseragh?"

"There are something over a dozen," said Tom. "There may be
fifteen in all. I was thinking of sending a draught over to
Tattersall's next week. There are some of them would not be worth a
five-and-twenty-pound note when you got them there!"

"Well, now I'll tell you what I propose. You shall send over
four or five to be summered at Doneraile. There is grass enough
there, and though I can't pay my debts, my credit is good at the
corn-chandler's." Black Tom, as he heard this, sat still looking
blacker than ever. He was a man who hated to have a favour offered
to him. But he could bear the insult better from Persse of Doneraile
than from anyone else in the county. "I've talked the matter over
with Lynch--"

"D---- Lynch," said Daly. He didn't dislike Sir Jasper, but Sir
Jasper did not stand quite so high in his favour as did Mr. Persse of
Doneraile.

"You needn't d---- anybody; but just listen to me. Sir Jasper says
that he will take three, and Nicholas Bodkin will do the same."

"They are both baronets," said Daly. "I hate a man with a handle to
his name; he always seems to me to be stuck-up, as though he demanded
so