CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

Robert Hart began his romantic life in simple circumstances.  He was born on the 20th day of February, 1835, in a little white house with green shutters on Dungannon Street, in the small Irish town of Portadown, County Armagh, and was the eldest of twelve children.  His mother, a daughter of Mr. John Edgar, of Ballybreagh, must have been a delightful woman, all tenderness and charity, judging from the way her children’s affections became entwined around her.  His father, Henry Hart, was a man of forceful and picturesque character, of a somewhat antique strain, and a Wesleyan to the core.  The household, therefore, grew up under the bracing influence of uncompromising doctrines; it was no unusual thing for one member to ask another at table, “What have you been doing for God to-day?” and so rigidly was Sunday observed that, had the family owned any Turners, I am sure they would have been covered up on Saturday nights, just as they were in Ruskin’s home.

When the young Robert was only twelve months old the Harts moved to Miltown, on the banks of beautiful Lough Neagh, remaining there barely a year.  Then they moved again—­this time to Hillsborough, where he attended his first school.  It came about in this way.  One afternoon he was called into the parlour by his father.  Two visitors—­not by any means an everyday occurrence in Miltown—­were within.  One was a stoutish man with sandy hair, the other a very long person like a knitting-needle.  The stout man called the boy to him, passed his hand carefully over the bumps of his head, and then, turning to the father, said, “From what I gather of this child’s talents from my examination of his cranial cerebration, my brother’s system of education is exactly the one calculated to develop them,” The men were two brothers named Arnold, who proposed to open a little school in Hillsborough and were tramping the country in search of pupils.

At the impressionable age of six or thereabouts an aunt fired the boy’s imagination with stories of the departed glories of the Hart family.  She used to tell him how their ancestor, Captain van Hardt, came over from Holland with King William, fought at the Battle of the Boyne and greatly distinguished himself; how afterwards, in recognition of his gallant services, the King gave him the township of Kilmoriarty as a reward; how the gallant captain settled himself down there, kept his horses, ate well, drank deep, and left the place so burdened with debt that one of his descendants was obliged to sell it.

“When I’m a man,” the little fellow would say solemnly after hearing these things, “I’ll buy back Kilmoriarty—­and I’ll get a title too.”  Of course she laughed at him quietly, thinking to herself how time and circumstances would separate the lad from the goodly company of his ambitions.  Yet, after all, he saw clearer than she; he never wavered in the serious purpose formed before he reached his teens, and he actually did buy back Kilmoriarty when it came on the market years afterwards.  As for a title, he gained a knighthood, a grand cross and a baronetcy—­thus fulfilling the second part of his promise grandly.