For six and twenty years, agents and middlemen had oppressed the hardy tenant of the soil; till, what had been courage, became fierceness; what had been humour, bitterness; and even native beauty of feature was veiled by the utterly hopeless expression, which hung on almost every countenance; while not the muscles of the face only, but the very limbs of naturally athletic men appeared relaxed. For the rewards of labour being insufficient to inspire industry, bodily fatigue was unsustained by mental energy, and the mere animal instinct of hunger remained the sole stimulus to exertion. It had never entered the minds of this simple, almost wild people, to look to the government for justice or redress. The executive power, in all its branches, was, and long had been, concentrated and personified in their imaginations under the loathed figure of a hangman; and him whom they considered as their natural protector, their landlord, leader, and hereditary chief, was out of the reach of hearing their complaints. It is not surprising, therefore, that the arrival of the happy couple, surrounded by all the splendour to which their rank and fortune entitled them, lending a ready ear to every tale of woe, and with the hand of benevolence open for the relief of every want, was viewed by all as the rising of the morning of hope, on a land long desolated by a dreary succession of stormy nights that knew no day between. Fitz-Ullin was so forcibly struck by the marks which all around him bore, of private duties sacrificed to public ones, during the long and brilliant life of the late Earl, that his reflections and resolutions on the subject very shortly became such as we may trace in a conversation which took place, a few evenings after his arrival at Ullin Castle. He was seated with his lovely Countess on the balcony of a high tower, from whence might be seen on every side, a large portion of the wide domains of his forefathers. He had been indulging in the fond hope, justified by the then situation of Julia, that the future possessor of all he now beheld, would, ere long, enter life amid prospects delightful to the heart of a parent, and sheltered too, he trusted, under providence, from the rough blasts, which he had in infancy encountered; for Julia had promised him that she herself would nurture her own child, and never commit it to the hands of a stranger, to run the risk of enduring what its father had endured. While these gentle thoughts dwelt in his mind, his eye accidentally rested on the smoke that stole from the lowly chimneys of some cottages, which, scattered at various intervals, lay concealed among the distant trees. As busy fancy painted the rustic group around each fire-side, a something like self-reproach smote upon the heart of Fitz-Ullin.