from the trim garden-beds which my good orderly mother tended.  In the churchyard there were two more names put into the stone over the family vault of the Bradys:  they were those of my cousin, for whom my regard was small, and my uncle, whom I had always loved.  I asked my old companion the blacksmith, who had beaten me so often in old days, to give my horse a feed and a litter:  he was a worn weary-looking man now, with a dozen dirty ragged children paddling about his smithy, and had no recollection of the fine gentleman who stood before him.  I did not seek to recall my-self to his memory till the next day, when I put ten guineas into his hand, and bade him drink the health of English Redmond.

As for Castle Brady, the gates of the park were still there; but the old trees were cut down in the avenue, a black stump jutting out here and there, and casting long shadows as I passed in the moonlight over the worn grass-grown old road.  A few cows were at pasture there.  The garden-gate was gone, and the place a tangled wilderness.  I sat down on the old bench, where I had sat on the day when Nora jilted me; and I do believe my feelings were as strong then as they had been when I was a boy, eleven years before; and I caught myself almost crying again, to think that Nora Brady had deserted me.  I believe a man forgets nothing.  I’ve seen a flower, or heard some trivial word or two, which have awakened recollections that somehow had lain dormant for scores of years; and when I entered the house in Clarges Street, where I was born (it was used as a gambling-house when I first visited London), all of a sudden the memory of my childhood came back to me—­of my actual infancy:  I recollected my father in green and gold, holding me up to look at a gilt coach which stood at the door, and my mother in a flowered sack, with patches on her face.  Some day, I wonder, will everything we have seen and thought and done come and flash across our minds in this way?  I had rather not.  I felt so as I sat upon the bench at Castle Brady, and thought of the bygone times.

The hall-door was open—­it was always so at that house; the moon was flaring in at the long old windows, and throwing ghastly chequers upon the floors; and the stars were looking in on the other side, in the blue of the yawning window over the great stair:  from it you could see the old stable-clock, with the letters glistening on it still.  There had been jolly horses in those stables once; and I could see my uncle’s honest face, and hear him talking to his dogs as they came jumping and whining and barking round about him of a gay winter morning.  We used to mount there; and the girls looked out at us from the hall-window, where I stood and looked at the sad, mouldy, lonely old place.  There was a red light shining through the crevices of a door at one corner of the building, and a dog presently came out baying loudly, and a limping man followed with a fowling-piece.

‘Who’s there?’ said the old man.