Mr. Robert Morris was somewhat of an oddity in his way; but he was a man who only a few months since was most unlikely to have fallen a victim to popular anger. He was about forty years of age, and had lived altogether at Minas Cottage, five or six miles from Cong, as you pass up the head of Lough Corrib, on the road to Maum. He was unmarried, and lived quite alone in a small house, trusting to the attentions of two old domestics and their daughter. He kept a horse and a car and a couple of cows and a few cocks and hens; but otherwise he lived alone. He was a man of property, and had, indeed, come from a family very long established in the county. People said of him that he had L500 a year; but he would have been very glad to have seen the half of it paid to his agent; for Mr. Morris, of Minas Cottage, had his agent as well as any other gentleman. He was a magistrate for the two counties, Galway and Mayo, and attended sessions both at Cong and at Clonbur. But when there he did little but agree with some more active magistrate; and what else he did with himself no one could tell of him. But it was said in respect to him that he was a benevolent gentleman; and but a year or two since very many in the neighbourhood would have declared him to be especially the poor man's friend. With L500 a year he could have done much; with half that income he could do something to assist them, and something he still did. He had his foibles, and fancies, but such as they were they did not tread on the corns of any of his poorer neighbours. He was proud of his birth, proud of his family, proud of having owned, either in his own hands or those of his forefathers, the same few acres,--and many more also, for his forefathers before him had terribly diminished the property. There was a story that his great great grandfather had lived in a palatial residence in County Kilkenny. All this he would tell freely, and would remark that to such an extent had the family been reduced by the extravagance of his forefathers. "But the name and the blood they can never touch," he would remark. They would not ask as to his successor, because they valued him too highly, and because Mr. Morris would never have admitted that the time had come when it was too late to bring a bride home to the western halls of his forefathers. But the rumour went that Minas Cottage would go in the female line to a second cousin, who had married a cloth merchant in Galway city, to whom nor to her husband did Mr. Morris ever speak. There might be something absurd in this, but there was nothing injurious to his neighbours, and nothing that would be likely to displease the poorer of them.