Patrick would have liked to fling a word in about the Englishman’s cast of his eye upon inviting lands, but the trot was resumed, the lord of Earlsfont having delivered his mind, and a minute made it happily too late for the sarcastic bolt.  Glad that his tongue had been kept from wagging, he trotted along beside his host in the dusky evening over the once contested land where the gentleman’s forefathers had done their deeds and firmly fixed their descendants.  A remainder of dull red fire prolonged the half-day above the mountain strongholds of the former owners of the soil, upon which prince and bard and priest, and grappling natives never wanting for fierceness, roared to-arms in the beacon-flames from ridge to peak:  and down they poured, and back they were pushed by the inveterate coloniser—­stationing at threatened points his old ‘artillerymen’ of those days and so it ends, that bard and priest and prince; holy poetry, and divine prescription, and a righteous holding; are as naught against him.  They go, like yonder embers of the winter sunset before advancing night:  and to morrow the beacon-heaps are ashes, the conqueror’s foot stamps on them, the wind scatters them; strangest of all, you hear victorious lawlessness appealing solemnly to God the law.

Patrick was too young to philosophise upon his ideas; or else the series of pictures projected by the troops of sensations running through him were not of a solidity to support any structure of philosophy.  He reverted, though rather in name than in spirit, to the abstractions, justice, consistency, right.  They were too hard to think of, so he abandoned the puzzle of fitting them to men’s acts and their consciences, and he put them aside as mere titles employed for the uses of a police and a tribunal to lend an appearance of legitimacy to the decrees of them that have got the upper hand.  An insurrectionary rising of his breast on behalf of his country was the consequence.  He kept it down by turning the whole hubbub within him to the practical contemplation of a visionary South America as the region for him and a fighting tenantry.  With a woman, to crown her queen there, the prospect was fair.  But where dwelt the woman possessing majesty suitable to such a dream in her heart or her head?  The best he had known in Ireland and in France, preferred the charms of society to bold adventure.

All the same, thought he, it’s queer counsel, that we should set to work by buying a bit of land to win a clean footing to rob our neighbours:  and his brains took another shot at Mr. Adister, this time without penetrating.  He could very well have seen the matter he disliked in a man that he disliked; but the father of Adiante had touched him with the gift of the miniature.