“Faix, it depends on the road ye go--by wan way it’s in or about six miles, and the other it’s three--though it’s all the same distance. Ye understand me?” “I cannot say that I exactly apprehend you, but if you would put me on the shortest route, I shall be greatly obliged----” “Then the shortest root, as ye call it, is through here, and I’ll put ye on it in a brace of shakes an’ kindly welcome.” “Thank you, I should be glad of your guidance,” replied the stranger, as he proceeded to clamber over the broken stile. Meanwhile, Mike Mahon, having knocked the ashes out of his pipe, deliberately descended from his roost, and led the way between an overgrowth of trees and shrubs, down a back avenue into a yard, entirely surrounded by large roofless outhouses. “Now, did ye ever see the like of that?” he demanded, with a dramatic wave of his horny hand. No. His companion never had, and he shook his head in solemn commiseration. Rank grass a foot high covered the stones, the pump was a wreck, the stables lairs of nettles and old iron. “This place has not been occupied for a long time, I take it.” “There hasn’t been a fire in the chimney, a soul inside its doors, for twenty-one years. Ah, when the ould master, General Macarthy, lived here, there wasn’t as much as a straw astray, no, nor a leaf itself. He was a great soldier, who had lived mostly in the Indies, and was a wonderful man for flowers.” Then they passed through a gap in a wall, and came on traces of the front avenue winding out of a forest of trees. There were trees on all sides, and on a sort of wide plateau stood the house. At the first glance its appearance administered a shock. The house was but a cottage. From the dimensions of the yard, the entrance, the imposing stretch of lawns and timber, one had naturally expected to see a mansion, or at least the ruins of a mansion. The grounds sloped gradually to the water’s edge, which was almost entirely hidden by a dense growth of shrubberies, and scattered over the wilderness to the left were marvellously luxuriant flowering plants, pampas grass, arbutus, rhododendrons, giant fuchsias, and at a little distance, a high and hoary garden wall, through its gates a vista of a wild jungle of high bushes and aged fruit-trees gone mad. The little spare lawyer absorbed each item of the scene with his quick, professional eye, and then turned to his guide with an air of mute interrogation. “Yes, ’tis a mortial pity,” he exclaimed, “for ’twas once the loveliest spot in the wide world.” The stranger made no reply, but gazed at the lake and the woods, and mentally admitted that the situation and view were not to be surpassed. “And so you say it has been empty this twenty-one years,” he remarked at last.