This history opens at a moment for Christian and her brethren when, possibly for the last time in their several careers, they asked nothing more of life. This was the beginning of the summer holidays; the sky was unclouded by a governess, the sunny air untainted by the whiff of a thought of a return to school. Anything might happen in seven weeks. The end of the world, for instance, might mercifully intervene, and, as this was Ireland, there was always a hope of a "rising," in which case it would be the boys' pleasing duty to stay at home and fight. "Well, and Judith and I would fight, too," Christian would say, thinking darkly of the Indian knife that she had stolen from the smoking-room, for use in emergencies. She varied in her arrangements as to the emergency. Sometimes the foe was to be the Land Leaguers, who were much in the foreground at this time; sometimes she decided upon the English oppressors of a down-trodden Ireland, to whose slaughter, on the whole, her fancy most inclined. But whatever the occasion, she was quite determined she was not going to be outdone by the boys. At nine years old, Christian was a little rag of a girl; a rag, but imbued with the spirit of the rag that is nailed to the mast, and flaunts, unconquered, until it is shot away. She had a small head, round and brown as a hazel-nut, and a thick mop of fine, bright hair, rebellious like herself, of the sort that goes with an ardent personality, waved and curled over her little poll, and generally ended the day in a tangle only less intricate than can be achieved by a skein of silk. Of her small oval face, people were accustomed to say it was all eyes, an unoriginal summarising, but one that forced itself inevitably upon those who met Christian's eyes, clear and shining, of the pale brown that the sun knows how to waken in a shallow pool in a hill-stream, set in a dark fringe of lashes that were like the rushes round the pool. Before she could speak, it was told of her eyes that they would quietly follow some visitor, invisible to others, but obvious to her. Occasionally, after the mysterious power of speech--that is almost as mysterious as the power of reading--had come to her, she had scared the nursery by broken conversation with viewless confederates, defined by the nursery-maid as "quare turns that'd take her, the Lord save us!" and by her mother, as "something that she will outgrow, and the less said about it the better, darlings. Remember, she is the youngest, and you must all be very wise and kind--" (a formula that took no heed of punctuation, and was practically invariable).