to her offspring.  With respect to his education, Val’s gratitude was principally due to his grandfather Clank, who had him well instructed.  He himself, from the beginning, was shrewd, clever, and intelligent, and possessed the power, in a singular degree, of adapting himself to his society, whenever he felt it his interest to do so.  He could, indeed, raise or depress his manners in a very surprising degree, and with an effort that often occasioned astonishment.  On the other hand, he was rapacious, unscrupulous, cowardly, and so vindictive, that he was never known to forgive an injury.  These are qualities to which, when you add natural adroitness and talent, you have such a character as has too frequently impressed itself, with something like the agreeable sensations produced by a red hot burning iron, upon the distresses, fears, and necessities of the Irish people.

M’Clutchy rose from the humble office of process-server to that of bailiff’s follower, bailiff, head-bailiff, barony constable, until, finally, he felt himself a kind of factotum on the Castle Cumber property; and in proportion as he rose, so did his manners rise with him.  For years before his introduction to our readers, he was the practical manager of the estate; and so judiciously did he regulate his own fortunes on it, that without any shameless or illegal breach of honesty, he actually contrived to become a wealthy man, and to live in a respectable manner.  Much, however, will have more, and Val was rapacious.  On finding himself comparatively independent, he began to take more enlarged, but still very cautious measures to secure some of the good things of the estate to him and his.  This he was the better able to do, as he had, by the apparent candor of his manner, completely wormed himself into the full confidence of the head agent—­a gentleman of high honor and integrity, remarkable alike for humanity and benevolence; but utterly without suspicion.  Two or three farms, whose leases dropped, he most iniquitously took into his own hands, and so far wheedled the agent, that he induced that gentleman to think he was rendering a service to the property by doing so.  The tenantry now began to murmur—­a complaint came here, and another there—­here was an instance of private and disguised oppression; and this was followed by a, vindictive attempt to injure either the property or character of some one who had the courage to tell him what he thought of his conduct.

Val apprehending that he might be out-borne by too powerful a mass of testimony, contrived just then, through his misrepresentations to the agent, who still confided in him, and by the political influence of his father, the squire, who was the landlord’s strongest electioneering supporter in the county, to get himself formally appointed under-agent.  Feeling now quite confident in his strength, and that his hold on the prejudices, and, we may add, the ignorance of the absentee landlord, was as strong, if not stronger