The father of Sir Francis Tyrrell had differed very little from his ancestors. He had been a bold, fearless, overbearing, and tyrannical man; a soldier in his youth, a fox-hunter in his latter days; a despot in his magisterial capacity, an irritating neighbour, and an insufferable master of his house. He had been a very handsome man withal; and, in order to prove his disregard for personal beauty, he had married a young lady of the neighbourhood of considerable fortune, but who certainly possessed few personal attractions. As a girl, she had been silent, calm, unobtrusive, apparently thoughtful; in person, little, dark, pale, with small, keen black eyes, and a somewhat pointed nose. Her voice had been sharp, but not very musical; and there was something in her whole demeanour which made the old clergyman of the parish, who had known her from her youth, and who was, moreover, somewhat waggishly disposed, declare, when he heard of the marriage about to take place, that he was excessively glad of it, for that she was just the wife for Sir John Tyrrell. When they were once fairly married, more of the lady's character appeared; not that she ever became more loquacious or loud-tongued than she had been before; but Sir John very soon found that she had always ready for any of his furious breakings forth of passion a calm, quiet, stinging reply, in which she seemed to combine with diabolical ingenuity everything that was most disagreeable for him to hear, and to compress it into the fewest possible words. She had a particular art, too, of modulating her voice, so that, in the midst of one of his most furious and noisy fits of rage, her low, quiet tones made themselves distinctly heard, and not one biting word was lost to his ear. Sir John was not a man to be frustrated even by this sort of warfare, and he carried it on with his lady through the whole of his life; but he was a candid man, and used occasionally to acknowledge that his furious speeches and behaviour, compared with the quiet words and demeanour of his wife, were as a drubbing with a crabstick to a cut with a scythe. The offspring of this hopeful union was Sir Francis Tyrrell, and well might his biographer declare that he combined in his own person all the virtues and qualities of his father and his mother: for, to an ungovernable temper, such as had descended to him from his ancestors, he added a sarcastic bitterness peculiarly his own.