and were, accordingly, admitted.  Then Aunt Becky visited the gaols, and had a knack of picking up the worst characters there, and had generally two or three discharged felons on her hands.  Some people said she was a bit of a Voltarian, but unjustly; for though she now and then came out with a bouncing social paradox, she was a good bitter Church-woman.  So she was liberal and troublesome—­off-handed and dictatorial—­not without good nature, but administering her benevolences somewhat tyrannically, and, for the most part, doing more or less of positive mischief in the process.

And now the general (’old Chattesworth,’ as the scornful Magnolia called him) drew near, with his benevolent smirk, and his stiff bows, and all his good-natured formalities—­for the general had no notion of ignoring his good friend and officer, Major O’Neill, or his sister or niece—­and so he made up to Mrs. Macnamara, who arrested a narrative in which she was demonstrating to O’Flaherty the general’s lineal descent from old Chattesworth—­an army tailor in Queen Anne’s time—­and his cousinship to a live butter dealer in Cork—­and spicing her little history with not a very nice epigram on his uncle, ‘the counsellor,’ by Dr. Swift, which she delivered with a vicious chuckle in the ‘Fireworker’s’ ear, who also laughed, though he did not quite see the joke, and said, ‘Oh-ho-ho, murdher!’

The good Mrs. Mack received the general haughtily and slightly, and Miss Magnolia with a short courtesy and a little toss of her head, and up went her fan, and she giggled something in Toole’s ear, who grinned, and glanced uneasily out of the corner of his shrewd little eye at the unsuspicious general and on to Aunt Rebecca; for it was very important to Dr. Toole to stand well at Belmont.  So, seeing that Miss Mag was disposed to be vicious, and not caring to be compromised by her tricks, he whistled and bawled to his dogs, and with a jolly smirk and flourish of his cocked-hat, off he went to seek other adventures.

Thus, was there feud and malice between two houses, and Aunt Rebecca’s wrong-headed freak of cutting the Macnamaras (for it was not ‘snobbery,’ and she would talk for hours on band-days publicly and familiarly with scrubby little Mrs. Toole), involved her innocent relations in scorn and ill-will; for this sort of offence, like Chinese treason, is not visited on the arch offender only, but according to a scale of consanguinity, upon his kith and kin.  The criminal is minced—­his sons lashed—­his nephews reduced to cutlets—­his cousins to joints—­and so on—­none of the family quite escapes; and seeing the bitter reprisals provoked by this kind of uncharity, fiercer and more enduring by much than any begotten of more tangible wrongs, Christian people who pray, ’lead us not into temptation,’ and repeat ‘blessed are the peace-makers,’ will, on the whole, do wisely to forbear practising it.