However, the next mail which came from Bruxelles, after Frank had received his mother’s letters there, brought back a joint composition from himself and his wife, who could spell no better than her young scapegrace of a husband, full of expressions of thanks, love, and duty to the Dowager Viscountess, as my poor lady now was styled; and along with this letter (which was read in a family council, namely, the Viscountess, Mistress Beatrix, and the writer of this memoir, and which was pronounced to be vulgar by the maid of honor, and felt to be so by the other two), there came a private letter for Colonel Esmond from poor Frank, with another dismal commission for the Colonel to execute, at his best opportunity; and this was to announce that Frank had seen fit, “by the exhortation of Mr. Holt, the influence of his Clotilda, and the blessing of heaven and the saints,” says my lord, demurely, “to change his religion, and be received into the bosom of that church of which his sovereign, many of his family, and the greater part of the civilized world, were members.”  And his lordship added a postscript, of which Esmond knew the inspiring genius very well, for it had the genuine twang of the Seminary, and was quite unlike poor Frank’s ordinary style of writing and thinking; in which he reminded Colonel Esmond that he too was, by birth, of that church; and that his mother and sister should have his lordship’s prayers to the saints (an inestimable benefit, truly!) for their conversion.

If Esmond had wanted to keep this secret, he could not; for a day or two after receiving this letter, a notice from Bruxelles appeared in the Post-Boy and other prints, announcing that “a young Irish lord, the Viscount C-stlew—­d, just come to his majority, and who had served the last campaigns with great credit, as aide-de-camp to his Grace the Duke of Marlborough, had declared for the Popish religion at Bruxelles, and had walked in a procession barefoot, with a wax-taper in his hand.”  The notorious Mr. Holt, who had been employed as a Jacobite agent during the last reign, and many times pardoned by King William, had been, the Post-Boy said, the agent of this conversion.

The Lady Castlewood was as much cast down by this news as Miss Beatrix was indignant at it.  “So,” says she, “Castlewood is no longer a home for us, mother.  Frank’s foreign wife will bring her confessor, and there will be frogs for dinner; and all Tusher’s and my grandfather’s sermons are flung away upon my brother.  I used to tell you that you killed him with the catechism, and that he would turn wicked as soon as he broke from his mammy’s leading-strings.  Oh, mother, you would not believe that the young scapegrace was playing you tricks, and that sneak of a Tusher was not a fit guide for him.  Oh, those parsons, I hate ’em all!” says Mistress Beatrix, clapping her hands together; “yes, whether they wear cassocks and buckles, or beards and bare feet.  There’s a horrid Irish wretch who never misses a Sunday at