of a hundred tucks, and hooped out prodigiously.  He was especially struck by one, a lady in green, who played with long white hands on a spinet.  But the massive and numerous oak bookcases, strictly wired with strong brass wire, and the tall oak fireplace, surmounted with a portrait of a man in a red coat holding a letter, whetted the edge of his depression, and Mike looked round with a pain of loneliness upon his face.  Speaking aloud for relief, he said—­

“No doubt it is all very fine, everything is up to the mark, but there’s no denying that it is—­well, it is dull.  Had I known it was going to be like this I’d have brought somebody down with me—­a nice woman.  Kitty would be delightful here.  But no; I would not bring her here for ten times the money the place is worth; to do so would be an insult on Helen’s memory....  Poor dear Helen!  I wish I had seen her before she died; and to think that she has left me all—­a beautiful house, plate, horses, carriages, wine; nothing is wanting; everything I have is hers, even this cigar.”  He threw the end of his cigar into the fireplace.

“How strange! what an extraordinary transformation!  And all this is mine, even her ancestors!  How angry that old fellow looks at me—­me, the son of an Irish peasant!  Yes, my father was that—­well, not exactly that, he was a grazier.  But why fear the facts? he was a peasant; and my mother was a French maid—­well, a governess—­well, a nursery governess, une bonne; she was dismissed from her situation for carrying on (it seems awful to speak of one’s mother so; but it is the fact)....  Respect!  I love my mother well enough, but I’m not going to delude myself because I had a mother.  Mother didn’t like our cabin by the roadside; father treated her badly; she ran away, taking me with her.  She was lucky enough to meet with a rich manufacturer, who kept her fairly well—­I believe he used to allow her a thousand francs a month—­and I used to call him uncle.  When mother died he sent me back to my father in Ireland.  That’s my history.  There’s not much blue blood in me....  I believe if one went back....  Bah, if one went back!  Why deceive myself?  I was born a peasant, and I know it....  Yet no one looks more like a gentleman; reversion to some original ancestor, I suppose.  Not one of these earls looks more like a gentleman than I. But I don’t suppose my looks would in any measure reconcile them to the fact of my possession of their property.

“Ah, you old fools—­periwigs, armour, and scrolls—­you old fools, you laboured only to make a gentleman of an Irish peasant.  Yes, you laboured in vain, my noble lords—­you, old gentleman yonder, you with the telescope—­an admiral, no doubt—­you sailed the seas in vain; and you over there, you mediaeval-looking cuss, you carried your armour through the battles of Cressy and Poictiers in vain; and you, noble lady in the high bodice, you whose fingers play with the flaxen curls of that boy—­he was the heir of this place two hundred years ago—­I say, you bore him in vain, your labour was in vain; and you, old fogey that you are, you in the red coat, you holding the letter in your gouty fingers, a commercial-looking letter, you laboured in trade to rehabilitate the falling fortunes of the family, and I say you too laboured in vain.  Without labour, without ache, I possess the result of all your centuries of labour.