It must be owned that Mathew Kearney was somewhat out of temper with his son even before the arrival of this letter. While the ‘swells,’ as he would persist in calling the two English visitors, were there, Dick took no trouble about them, nor to all seeming made any impression on them. As Mathew said, ‘He let Joe Atlee make all the running, and, signs on it! Joe Atlee was taken off to town as Walpole’s companion, and Dick not so much as thought of. Joe, too, did the honours of the house as if it was his own, and talked to Lockwood about coming down for the partridge-shooting as if he was the head of the family. The fellow was a bad lot, and McKeown was right so far--the less Dick saw of him the better.’ The trouble and distress these reflections, and others like them, cost him would more than have recompensed Dick, had he been hard-hearted enough to desire a vengeance. ‘For a quarter of an hour, or maybe twenty minutes,’ said he, ‘I can be as angry as any man in Europe, and, if it was required of me during that time to do anything desperate--downright wicked--I could be bound to do it; and what’s more, I’d stand to it afterwards if it cost me the gallows. But as for keeping up the same mind, as for being able to say to myself my heart is as hard as ever, I’m just as much bent on cruelty as I was yesterday--that’s clean beyond me; and the reason, God help me, is no great comfort to me after all--for it’s just this: that when I do a hard thing, whether distraining a creature out of his bit of ground, selling a widow’s pig, or fining a fellow for shooting a hare, I lose my appetite and have no heart for my meals; and as sure as I go asleep, I dream of all the misfortunes in life happening to me, and my guardian angel sitting laughing all the while and saying to me, “Didn’t you bring it on yourself, Mathew Kearney? couldn’t you bear a little rub without trying to make a calamity of it? Must somebody be always punished when anything goes wrong in life? Make up your mind to have six troubles every day of your life, and see how jolly you’ll be the day you can only count five, or maybe four.”’ As Mr. Kearney sat brooding in this wise, Peter Gill made his entrance into the study with the formidable monthly lists and accounts, whose examination constituted a veritable doomsday to the unhappy master. ‘Wouldn’t next Saturday do, Peter?’ asked Kearney, in a tone of almost entreaty. ‘I’m afther ye since Tuesday last, and I don’t think I’ll be able to go on much longer.’ Now as Mr. Gill meant by this speech to imply that he was obliged to trust entirely to his memory for all the details which would have been committed to writing by others, and to a notched stick for the manifold dates of a vast variety of events, it was not really a very unfair request he had made for a peremptory hearing. ‘I vow to the Lord,’ sighed out Kearney, ‘I believe I’m the hardest-worked man in the three kingdoms.’