e, and yellow gloves, new every morning, throwing
down the 'Naps' at that thieving game they call 'Red and Black,'
you'd say he was the Duke of Leinster!"

"Was he so like his Grace?" asked Lady Hester, with a delightful
simplicity.

"No; but grander!" replied Dalton, with a wave of his hand.

"It is really, as you remark, very true," resumed her Ladyship. "It is
quite impossible to venture upon an acquaintance out of England; and I
cordially concur in the caution you practise."

"So I 'm always telling the girls, 'better no company than trumpery!'
not that I don't like a bit of sociality as well as ever I did, a snug
little party of one's own, people whose mothers and fathers had names,
the real old stock of the land. But to be taken up with every chance
rapscallion you meet on the cross-roads, to be hand and glove with this,
that, and the other, them never was my sentiments."

It is but justice to confess there was less of hypocrisy in the bland
smile Lady Hester returned to this speech than might be suspected;
for, what between the rapidity of Daiton's utterance, and the peculiar
accentuation he gave to certain words, she did not really comprehend
one syllable of what he said. Meanwhile the two girls sat silent and
motionless. Nelly, in all the suffering of shame at the absurdity of her
father's tone, the vulgarity of an assumption she had fondly hoped years
of poverty might have tamed down, if not obliterated; Kate, in mute
admiration of their lovely visitor, of whose graces she never wearied.
Nor did Lady Hester make any effort to include them in the conversation;
she had come out expressly for one sole object, to captivate Mr. Dalton;
and she would suffer nothing to interfere with her project. To this
end she heard his long and tiresome monologues about Irish misery and
distress, narrated with an adherence to minute and local details that
made the whole incomprehensible; she listened to him with well-feigned
interest, in his narratives of the Daltons of times long past, of their
riotous and extravagant living, their lawlessness, and their daring;
nor did she permit her attention to flag while he recounted scenes and
passages of domestic annals that might almost have filled a page of
savage history.

"How sorry you must have felt to leave a country so dear by all its
associations and habits!" sighed she, as he finished a narrative of
more than ordinary horrors.

"Ain't I breaking my heart over it? Ain't I f