I accompanied my mother to Penrith, and forthwith devoted myself heart and body to the preparation of our new house, and the beautifying of the very pretty paddock in which it was situated.  I put in some hundreds of trees and shrubs with my own hands, which prospered marvellously, and have become, I have been told, most luxuriant shrubberies.  I was bent on building a cloistered walk along the entire top of the field, which would have afforded a charming ambulatory sheltered from the north winds and from the rain, and would have commanded the most lovely views, while the pillars supporting the roof would have presented admirable places for a world of flowering climbing plants.  And doubtless I should have achieved it, had we remained there.  But it would have run into too much money to be undertaken immediately,—­fortunately; for, inasmuch as there was nothing of the sort in all that country side, no human being would have given a stiver more for the house when it came to be sold, and the next owner would probably have pulled it down.  There was no authority for such a thing.  Had it been suffered to remain it would probably have been called “Trollope’s folly!”

Subsequently, but not immediately after we left it, the place—­oddly enough I forget the name we gave it—­became the property and the residence of my brother-in-law.

Of my life at Penrith I need add nothing to the jottings I have already placed before the reader on the occasion of my first visit to that place.

My brother, already a very different man from what he had been in London, came from his Irish district to visit us there; and I returned with him to Ireland, to his head-quarters at Banagher on the Shannon.  Neither of this journey need I say much.  For to all who know anything of Ireland at the present day—­and who does not? worse luck!—­anything I might write would seem as nihil ad rem, as if I were writing of an island in the Pacific.  I remember a very vivid impression that occurred to me on first landing at Kingstown, and accompanied me during the whole of my stay in the island, to the effect, that the striking differences in everything that fell under my observation from what I had left behind me at Holyhead, were fully as great as any that had excited my interest when first landing in France.

One of my first visits was to my brother’s chief.  He was a master of foxhounds and hunted the country.  And I well remember my astonishment, when the door of this gentleman’s residence was opened to me by an extremely dirty and slatternly bare-footed and bare-legged girl.  I found him to be a very friendly and hospitable good fellow, and his wife and her sister very pleasant women.  I found too that my brother stood high in his good graces by virtue of simply having taken the whole work and affairs of the postal district on his own shoulders.  The rejected of St. Martin’s-le-Grand was already a very valuable and capable officer.