“She can have the cob, Tom,” interposed stout and sympathetic Lady Purcell, on whom the tears of her youngest born were having their wonted effect, “I’ll take the donkey chaise if I go out.”

“The cob is it?” responded Sir Thomas, in the stalwart brogue in which he usually expressed himself.  “The cob has a leg on him as big as your own since the last day one of them had him out!” The master of the house looked round with exceeding disfavour on his eight good-looking daughters.  “However, I suppose it’s as good to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and if you don’t want him—­”

The youngest Miss Purcell swiftly returned her handkerchief to her pocket, and left the room before any change of opinion was possible.

Mount Purcell was one of those households that deserve to be subsidised by any country neighbourhood in consideration of their unfailing supply of topics of conversation.  Sir Thomas was a man of old family, of good income and of sufficient education, who, while reserving the power of comporting himself like a gentleman, preferred as a rule to assimilate his demeanour to that of one of his own tenants (with whom, it may be mentioned, he was extremely popular).  Many young men habitually dined out on Sir Thomas’s brogue and his unwearying efforts to dispose of his eight daughters.

His wife was a handsome, amiable, and by no means unintelligent lady upon whose back the eight daughters had ploughed and had left long furrows.  She was not infrequently spoken of as “that un_for_tunate Lady Purcell!” with a greater or less broadening of the accent on the second syllable according to the social standard of the speaker.  Her tastes were comprehended and sympathised with by her gardener, and by the clerk at Mudie’s who refilled her box.  The view taken of her by her husband and family was mainly a negative one, and was tinged throughout by the facts that she was afraid to drive anything more ambitious than the donkey, and had been known to mistake the kennel terrier for a hound puppy.  She had succeeded in transmitting to her daughters her very successful complexion and blue eyes, but her responsibility for them had apparently gone no further.  The Misses Purcell faced the world and its somewhat excessive interest in them with the intrepid esprit de corps of a square of British infantry, but among themselves they fought, as the coachman was wont to say—­and no one knew better than the coachman—­“both bitther an regular, like man and wife!” They ranged in age from about five and twenty downwards, sportswomen, warriors, and buccaneers, all of them, and it would be difficult to determine whether resentment or a certain secret pride bulked the larger in their male parent’s mind in connection with them.

“Are you going to draw Clashnacrona to-morrow?” asked Muriel, the second of the gang (Lady Purcell, it should have been mentioned, had also been responsible for her daughters’ names), rising from her chair and pouring what was left of her after dinner coffee into her saucer, a proceeding which caused four pairs of lambent eyes to discover themselves in the coiled mat of red setters that occupied the drawing-room hearthrug.