The cry which followed the reading of this document can only be described as a howl. It was like the enraged roar of wild animals, rather than the union of human voices; and it was not till after a considerable interval that McGloin could obtain a hearing. He spoke with great vigour and fluency. He denounced the letter as an outrage which should be proclaimed from one end of Europe to the other; that it was not their town, or their club, or themselves had been insulted, but Ireland! that this mock-lord (cheers)--this sham viscount--(greater cheers)--this Brummagem peer, whose nobility their native courtesy and natural urbanity had so long deigned to accept as real, should now be taught that his pretensions only existed on sufferance, and had no claim beyond the polite condescension of men whom it was no stretch of imagination to call the equals of Mathew Kearney. The cries that received this were almost deafening, and lasted for some minutes. ‘Send the ould humbug his picture there,’ cried a voice from the crowd, and the sentiment was backed by a roar of voices; and it was at once decreed the portrait should accompany the letter which the indignant ‘Goats’ now commissioned their chairman to compose. That same evening saw the gold-framed picture on its way to Kilgobbin Castle, with an ample-looking document, whose contents we have no curiosity to transcribe--nor, indeed, is the whole incident one which we should have cared to obtrude upon our readers, save as a feeble illustration of the way in which the smaller rills of public opinion swell the great streams of life, and how the little events of existence serve now as impulses, now obstacles, to the larger interests that sway fortune. So long as Mathew Kearney drank his punch at the ‘Blue Goat’ he was a patriot and a Nationalist; but when he quarrelled with his flock, he renounced his Irishry, and came out a Whig. CHAPTER XXXII AN UNLOOKED-FOR PLEASURE When Dick Kearney waited on Cecil Walpole at his quarters in the Castle, he was somewhat surprised to find that gentleman more reserved in manner, and in general more distant, than when he had seen him as his father’s guest. Though he extended two fingers of his hand on entering, and begged him to be seated, Walpole did not take a chair himself, but stood with his back to the fire--the showy skirts of a very gorgeous dressing-gown displayed over his arms--where he looked like some enormous bird exulting in the full effulgence of his bright plumage. ‘You got my note, Mr. Kearney?’ began he, almost before the other had sat down, with the air of a man whose time was too precious for mere politeness. ‘It is the reason of my present visit,’ said Dick dryly.