Of the Talbot-Lowrys it may be truly said that the lot had fallen to them in a fair ground. Their ancestor, the Gentleman Adventurer of Queen Elizabeth's time, had had the eye for the country that, in a slightly different sense, had descended to his present representative. Mount Music House stood about midway of a long valley, on a level plateau of the hill from which it took its name, Cnocán an Ceoil Sidhe, which means the Hill of Fairy Music, and may, approximately, be pronounced "Knockawn an K'yole Shee." The hill melted downwards--no other word can express the velvet softness of those mild, grassy slopes--to the shore of the River Broadwater, a slow and lordly stream, that moved mightily down the wide valley, became merged for a space in Lough Kieraun, and thence flowed onwards, broad and brimming, bearded with rushes, passing like a king, cloaked in the splendours of the sunset, to its suicide in the far-away Atlantic. The demesne of Mount Music lay along its banks; in woods often, more often in pastures; with boggy places ringed with willows, lovely, in their seasons, with yellow flags, and meadowsweet, kingcups, ragwort and loosestrife. Its western boundary was the Ownashee, a mountain stream, a tributary of the great river, that came storming down from the hills, and, in times of flood, snatching, like a border-reiver, at sheep, and pigs, and fowl, tossing its spoils in a tumble of racing waves into the wide waters of its chieftain. Mount Music House was large, intensely solid, practical, sensible, of that special type of old Irish country-house that is entirely remote from the character of the men that originated it, and can only be explained as the expiring cry of the English blood. How many Anglo-Irish great-great-grandfathers have not raised these monuments to their English forbears, and then, recognising their obligations to their Irish mothers' ancestry, have filled them, gloriously, with horses and hounds, and butts of claret, and hungry poor relations unto the fourth and fifth generations? That they were a puissant breed, the history of the Empire, in which they have so staunchly borne their parts, can tell; their own point of view is fairly accurately summed up in Curran's verse:-- "If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking, Could more than drinking my cares compose, A cure for sorrow from sighs I'd borrow, And hope to-morrow would end my woes. But as in wailing there's nought availing, And Death unfailing will strike the blow, Then for that reason, and for a season, Let us be merry before we go."