FOOTNOTE: 

[Footnote 1:  These little verses have been several times set to music, and last and very sweetly, by Miss Elizabeth Philp.]

CHAPTER XXV.

IN WHICH THE SUN SETS, AND THE MERRY-MAKING IS KEPT UP BY CANDLE-LIGHT IN THE KING’S HOUSE, AND LILY RECEIVES A WARNING WHICH SHE DOES NOT COMPREHEND.

Dr. Toole, without whom no jollification of any sort could occur satisfactorily in Chapelizod or the country round, was this evening at the ‘King’s House,’ of course, as usual, with his eyes about him and his tongue busy; and at this moment he was setting Cluffe right about Devereux’s relation to the title and estates of Athenry.  His uncle Roland Lord Athenry was, as everybody knew, a lunatic—­Toole used to call him Orlando Furioso:  and Lewis, his first cousin by his father’s elder brother—­the heir presumptive—­was very little better, and reported every winter to be dying.  He spends all his time—­his spine being made, it is popularly believed, of gristle—­stretched on his back upon a deal board, cutting out paper figures with a pair of scissors.  Toole used to tell them at the club, when alarming letters arrived about the health of the noble uncle and his hopeful nephew—­the heir apparent—­’That’s the gentleman who’s back-bone’s made of jelly—­eh, Puddock?  Two letters come, by Jove, announcing that Dick Devereux’s benefit is actually fixed for the Christmas holidays, when his cousin undertakes to die for positively the last time, and his uncle will play in the most natural manner conceivable, the last act of “King Lear."’ In fact, this family calamity was rather a cheerful subject among Devereux’s friends; and certainly Devereux had no reason to love that vicious, selfish old lunatic, Lord Athenry, who in his prodigal and heartless reign, before straw and darkness swallowed him, never gave the boy a kind word or gentle look, and owed him a mortal grudge because he stood near the kingdom, and wrote most damaging reports of him at the end of the holidays, and despatched those letters of Bellerophon by the boy’s own hand to the schoolmaster, with the natural results.

When Aunt Rebecca rustled into the ring that was gathered round about the fiddles and tambourine, she passed Miss Magnolia very near, with a high countenance, and looking straight before her, and with no more recognition than the tragedy queen bestows upon the painted statue on the wing by which she enters.  And Miss Mag followed her with a titter and an angry flash of her eyes.  So Aunt Rebecca made up to the little hillock—­little bigger than a good tea-cake—­on which the dowager was perched in a high-backed chair, smiling over the dancers with a splendid benignity, and beating time with her fat short foot.  And Aunt Becky told Mrs. Colonel Stafford, standing by, she had extemporised a living Watteau, and indeed it was a very pretty picture, or Aunt Becky would not have said so; and ‘craning’ from this eminence she saw her niece coming leisurely round, not in company of Mervyn.