, while O'Shea turned
towards the house.

CHAPTER LIII

A SCRAPE

We have all of us felt how depressing is the sensation felt in a family
circle in the first meeting after the departure of their guests. The
friends who have been staying some time in your house not only bring to the
common stock their share of pleasant converse and companionship, but, in
the quality of strangers, they exact a certain amount of effort for their
amusement, which is better for him who gives than for the recipient,
and they impose that small reserve which excludes the purely personal
inconveniences and contrarieties, which unhappily, in strictly family
intercourse, have no small space allotted them for discussion.

It is but right to say that they who benefit most by, and most gratefully
acknowledge, this boon of the visitors, are the young. The elders,
sometimes more disposed to indolence than effort, sometimes irritable at
the check essentially put upon many little egotisms of daily use, and
oftener than either, perhaps, glad to get back to the old groove of home
discussion, unrestrained by the presence of strangers; the elders are
now and then given to express a most ungracious gratitude for being once
again to themselves, and free to be as confidential and outspoken and
disagreeable as their hearts desire.

The dinner at Kilgobbin Castle, on the day I speak of, consisted solely of
the Kearney family, and except in the person of the old man himself, no
trace of pleasantry could be detected. Kate had her own share of anxieties.
A number of notices had been served by refractory tenants for demands they
were about to prefer for improvements, under the new land act. The passion
for litigation, so dear to the Irish peasant's heart--that sense of having
something to be quibbled for, so exciting to the imaginative nature of the
Celt, had taken possession of all the tenants on the estate, and even the
well-to-do and the satisfied were now bestirring themselves to think if
they had not some grievance to be turned into profit, and some possible
hardship to be discounted into an abatement.

Dick Kearney, entirely preoccupied by the thought of his intended journey,
already began to feel that the things of home touched him no longer. A few
months more and he should be far away from Ireland and her interests, and
why should he harass himself about the contests of party or the balance of
factions, which never again could have any bearing o