This sentimental and saintly creature wrought the utmost havoc around her, and went dreamily through life unconscious or sublimely indifferent, with her gaze of impassioned sadness fixed upon her heavenly home. Youths went down before her like ninepins, and trembled when they addressed her. One lad of sixteen rode past the door with a crimson cravat, which he fondly hoped to be becoming, and the moody intensity of expression that betokens a broken heart. She minded him not. She was reading "Fabiola" for the hundredth time in the front garden. The gate was open. In his amorous distraction the youth forgot the proprieties, and rode through the gate in lordly style. The door likewise was open, and the pony gallantly galloped into the hall. My sister's dismay was nothing to the youth's. He stammered and stuttered and went so red that the wonder was he ever grew pale again. But we were used to these commotions aroused by our young Saint Agnes in the bosom of excitable youth. It did not hurt her, and it did not harm them. With gracious gravity she escorted the poor lad to the gate; but we who knew her knew that she was stifling with suppressed laughter. For my eldest sister had a pretty humour, even an irony of her own, and gaiety, as will be seen, was not contraband in her religion. She constituted herself our veritable mother in that old rambling house of Dalkey. She ruled us like an autocrat, and punished us with a lamentable severity. To teach us self-control and fearlessness, she insisted that the smallest baby should be taken in her night-dress, half asleep, and flung into the wild Irish sea that roared at the foot of the garden. No mercy was shown a recalcitrant babe. Howl she never so dolorously, she was plunged in head-foremost, sputtering salt through her rebellious lips. At night, when our parents stayed in town, she gathered us together in the long low drawing-room, and insisted that we should examine our consciences, meditate, and say the Rosary aloud to keep away robbers and ghosts. All the boys got to know of this edifying practice, and outside the window a crowd of arch-villains would gather, and shout the responses derisively. We could hear Arthur's high-bred tones sing out "Holy Mary, Mother of God," above the deep bass notes of the red-headed chief. Arthur's brother, an elegant guardsman, staying with the old lord for a couple of weeks, often condescended to join the band of reprobates; and once I peeped out through the big chinks of the shutter, and saw the man of fashion, with the hall-light directly upon his lean and bronzed visage, eyes devoutly lifted to heaven in mimicry of my eldest sister's ecstatic gaze, and hands folded like those of a stained-glass picture: "Holy Mary! pray for me, a miserable sinner. Blessed St. Agnes, help, oh help to convert me!"