Edmund L’Estrange’s branch of the family had been long settled in Ireland. It was staunchly loyalist. His grandfather, as colonel of an Irish militia regiment, had been active in the quelling of the Rebellion of ’98, and had smitten his malcontent fellow-countrymen hip and thigh. His father was a conscientious absentee. Edmund, a younger son, had spent his youth on the old L’Estrange demesne in county Clare, and, an Englishman by extraction, had grown up more Irish than the Irish. As a lad of fifteen he had commanded a scratch company of Fenian rapparees, he armed with a shot-gun, his ragged band with pikes. One dark night the dragoons swept on to the moorland where the Fenian drill was in progress. In the stampede fierce old Major Towers, outstripping his squadron, felled young L’Estrange with a blow of his loaded riding-whip, and then savagely rode over the prostrate lad. Edmund, bruised and half-stunned, rolled into a bog-hag, and fainted. When he recovered he staggered to his feet, softly cursed a little--he was not a violent person--then knelt down and swore eternal enmity against England and against all persons, things, enterprises, and devices that were English. After two years spent in hard study of Continental languages, he sold for money down his succession to his dead mother’s property which he was to inherit when of age, and left the country without the ceremony of bidding farewell to his family. It is for the most part in the poor and proud old families of Scotland wherein generation after generation has been developed that centrifugal force which propels their cadets all over the face of the earth. But this force has been in operation also in many Irish and in some English houses. It had been a characteristic, for instance, of the L’Estranges. Of that race there had been a cadet family in Russia ever since a young L’Estrange had found his way to St. Petersburg along with a Greig, a Barclay, a Ramsay, a Taafe, and a Mackenzie--bent on taking service in the army or the navy of the Empress Catherine--not Carlyle’s _infâme Catin du Nord_, but the greater and perhaps more infamous Muscovite sovereign. To General L’Estrange, the chief of the famous Pauloff Grenadiers, his young cousin betook himself and was well received. Tactful, astute, silent, and resourceful, the youngster made his way marvellously. Treskoff the arch-policeman, and Milutin the War Minister, both had uses for this scion of the British Empire who notoriously hated the realm whose fealty he had repudiated. When the Russo-Turkish War began, Ignatieff brought him to Kischeneff and presented him to the Emperor. He and poor Prince Tzeretleff together exploited the Hankioj Pass for Gourko’s troopers. He was with Skobeleff before Plevna and before Constantinople. When, baulked of the fair Queen of the Bosphorus, Alexander determined on the Afghan diversion, young L’Estrange was sent post haste to Samarcand, and rode into Cabul as Stolietoff’s subaltern.