g. He was to go also, but before the scene was over
he also had taken to sobbing violently.

"I wish you all well and happy," said Herbert, making his little
speech, "and regret deeply that the intercourse between us should be
thus suddenly severed. You have served me and mine well and truly,
and it is hard upon you now, that you should be bid to go and seek
another home elsewhere."

"It isn't that we mind, Mr. Herbert; it ain't that as frets us," said
one of the men.

"It ain't that at all, at all," said Richard, doing chorus; "but that
yer honour should be robbed of what is yer honour's own."

"But you all know that we cannot help it," continued Herbert; "a
misfortune has come upon us which nobody could have foreseen, and
therefore we are obliged to part with our old friends and servants."

At the word friends the maid-servants all sobbed. "And 'deed we is
your frinds, and true frinds, too," wailed the cook.

"I know you are, and it grieves me to feel that I shall see you no
more. But you must not be led to think by what Richard says that
anybody is depriving me of that which ought to be my own. I am now
leaving Castle Richmond because it is not my own, but justly belongs
to another;--to another who, I must in justice tell you, is in no
hurry to claim his inheritance. We none of us have any ground for
displeasure against the present owner of this place, my cousin, Sir
Owen Fitzgerald."

"We don't know nothing about Sir Owen," said one voice.

"And don't want," said another, convulsed with sobs.

"He's a very good sort of young gentleman--of his own kind, no
doubt," said Richard.

"But you can all of you understand," continued Herbert, "that as this
place is no longer our own, we are obliged to leave it; and as we
shall live in a very different way in the home to which we are going,
we are obliged to part with you, though we have no reason to find
fault with any one among you. I am going to-morrow morning early, and
my mother and sisters will follow after me in a few weeks. It will be
a sad thing too for them to say good-bye to you all, as it is for me
now; but it cannot be helped. God bless you all, and I hope that you
will find good masters and kind mistresses, with whom you may live
comfortably, as I hope you have done here."

"We can't find no other mistresses like her leddyship," sobbed out
the senior housemaid.

"There ain't niver such a one in the county Cork," said the cook; "in
a week of Sunday