To arrest his father’s recollection of the various occasions on which his illegality had betrayed him into loss and damage, Dick blurted out, ‘I’d rather break stones on the road than I’d be an attorney.’ ‘Well, you’ll not have to go far for employment, for they are just laying down new metal this moment; and you needn’t lose time over it,’ said Kearney, with a wave of his hand, to show that the audience was over and the conference ended. ‘There’s just one favour I would ask, sir,’ said Dick, with his hand on the lock. ‘You want a hammer, I suppose,’ said his father, with a grin--‘isn’t _that_ it?’ With something that, had it been uttered aloud, sounded very like a bitter malediction, Dick rushed from the room, slamming the door violently after him as he went. ‘That’s the temper that helps a man to get on in life,’ said the old man, as he turned once more to his accounts, and set to work to see where he had blundered in his figures. CHAPTER XVII DICK’S REVERIE When Dick Kearney left his father, he walked from the house, and not knowing or much caring in what direction he went, turned into the garden. It was a wild, neglected sort of spot, with fruit-trees of great size, long past bearing, and close underwood in places that barred the passage. Here and there little patches of cultivation appeared, sometimes flowering plants, but oftener vegetables. One long alley, with tall hedges of box, had been preserved, and led to a little mound planted with laurels and arbutus, and known as ‘Laurel Hill’; here a little rustic summer-house had once stood, and still, though now in ruins, showed where, in former days, people came to taste the fresh breeze above the tree-tops, and enjoy the wide range of a view that stretched to the Slieve-Bloom Mountains, nearly thirty miles away. Young Kearney reached this spot, and sat down to gaze upon a scene every detail of which was well known to him, but of which he was utterly unconscious as he looked. ‘I am turned out to starve,’ cried he aloud, as though there was a sense of relief in thus proclaiming his sorrow to the winds. ‘I am told to go and work upon the roads, to live by my daily labour. Treated like a gentleman until I am bound to that condition by every tie of feeling and kindred, and then bade to know myself as an outcast. I have not even Joe Atlee’s resource--I have not imbibed the instincts of the lower orders, so as to be able to give them back to them in fiction or in song. I cannot either idealise rebellion or make treason tuneful.