Were I to suffer myself to dwell even in thought on this period of my life, I feel how insensibly I should be led away into an inexcusable prolixity. The little meaningless incidents of my daily life, all so engraven on my memory still, occupied me pleasantly from day till night. Not only the master of myself and my own time, I was master of every thing around me. Uncle Pat, as he loved to call himself, treated me with a degree of respect that was almost painful to me, and only when we were alone together, did he relapse into the intimacy of equality. Two first-rate hunters stood in my stable; a stout-built half-deck boat lay at my command beside the quay; I had my gun and my grayhounds; books, journals; every thing, in short, that a liberal purse and a kind spirit could confer--all but acquaintance. Of these I possessed absolutely none. Too proud to descend to intimacy with the farmers and small shopkeepers of the neighborhood, my position excluded me from acquaintance with the gentry; and thus I stood between both, unknown to either. For a while my new career was too absorbing to suffer me to dwell on this circumstance. The excitement of field sports sufficed me when abroad, and I came home usually so tired at night that I could barely keep awake to amuse Uncle Pat with those narratives of war and campaigning he was so fond of hearing. To the hunting-field succeeded the Bay of Dublin, and I passed days, even weeks, exploring every creek and inlet of the coast; now cruising under the dark cliffs of the Welsh shore, or, while my boat lay at anchor, wandering among the solitary valleys of Lambay; my life, like a dream full of its own imaginings, and unbroken by the thoughts or feelings of others! I will not go the length of saying that I was self-free from all reproach on the inglorious indolence in which my days were passed, or that my thoughts never strayed away to that land where my first dreams of ambition were felt. But a strange fatuous kind of languor had grown upon me, and the more I retired within myself, the less did I wish for a return to that struggle with the world which every active life engenders. Perhaps--I can not now say if it were so--perhaps I resented the disdainful distance with which the gentry treated me, as we met in the hunting-field or the coursing-ground. Some of the isolation I preferred may have had this origin, but choice had the greater share in it, until at last my greatest pleasure was to absent myself for weeks on a cruise, fancying that I was exploring tracts never visited by man, and landing on spots where no human foot had ever been known to tread.