Phineas Finn reached Loughlinter together with Mr. Ratler in a post-chaise from the neighbouring town.  Mr. Ratler, who had done this kind of thing very often before, travelled without impediments, but the new servant of our hero’s was stuck outside with the driver, and was in the way.  “I never bring a man with me,” said Mr. Ratler to his young friend.  “The servants of the house like it much better, because they get fee’d; you are just as well waited on, and it don’t cost half as much.”  Phineas blushed as he heard all this; but there was the impediment, not to be got rid of for the nonce, and Phineas made the best of his attendant.  “It’s one of those points,” said he, “as to which a man never quite makes up his mind.  If you bring a fellow, you wish you hadn’t brought him; and if you don’t, you wish you had.”  “I’m a great deal more decided in my ways that that,” said Mr. Ratler.

Loughlinter, as they approached it, seemed to Phineas to be a much finer place than Saulsby.  And so it was, except that Loughlinter wanted that graceful beauty of age which Saulsby possessed.  Loughlinter was all of cut stone, but the stones had been cut only yesterday.  It stood on a gentle slope, with a greensward falling from the front entrance down to a mountain lake.  And on the other side of the Lough there rose a mighty mountain to the skies, Ben Linter.  At the foot of it, and all round to the left, there ran the woods of Linter, stretching for miles through crags and bogs and mountain lands.  No better ground for deer than the side of Ben Linter was there in all those highlands.  And the Linter, rushing down into the Lough through rocks which, in some places, almost met together above its waters, ran so near to the house that the pleasant noise of its cataracts could be heard from the hall door.  Behind the house the expanse of drained park land seemed to be interminable; and then, again, came the mountains.  There were Ben Linn and Ben Lody;—­and the whole territory belonging to Mr. Kennedy.  He was laird of Linn and laird of Linter, as his people used to say.  And yet his father had walked into Glasgow as a little boy,—­no doubt with the normal half-crown in his breeches pocket.

“Magnificent;—­is it not?” said Phineas to the Treasury Secretary, as they were being driven up to the door.

“Very grand;—­but the young trees show the new man.  A new man may buy a forest; but he can’t get park trees.”

Phineas, at the moment, was thinking how far all these things which he saw, the mountains stretching everywhere around him, the castle, the lake, the river, the wealth of it all, and, more than the wealth, the nobility of the beauty, might act as temptations to Lady Laura Standish.  If a woman were asked to have the half of all this, would it be possible that she should prefer to take the half of his nothing?  He thought it might be possible for a girl who would confess, or seem to confess, that love should be everything.