Conspicuous amongst the most conspicuous of the stars; of the ascendant, was a lady, who took the field with an _éclat_, a brilliancy, and bustle, which for a time fixed the attention of all upon herself. Although a fine woman, in the strictest sense of the term, and still handsome, though not still very young, she was even more distinguished by her air of high supremacy, than by her beauty. She sat loftily in a lofty phaeton, which was emblazoned with arms, and covered with coronets; and she played with her long whip, as ladies of old managed their fans, with grace and coquetry. She was dressed in a rich habit, whose facings and epaulettes spoke her the lady of the noble colonel of some provincial corps of volunteers. A high military cap, surmounted with a plume of black feathers, well became her bright, bold, black eyes, and her brow that looked as if accustomed "to threaten and command." The air had deepened her colour through her rouge, as it had blown from her dark, dishevelled tresses the mareschal powder, then still worn in Ireland--(the last lingering barbarism of the British toilette, which France had already abandoned, with other barbarous modes, and exchanged for the _coiffure d'Arippine_ and the _tête à la Brutus_.) Her _pose_, her glance, her nod, her smile, all conscious and careless as they were, proclaimed a privileged autocrat of the Irish _bon ton_, a "_dasher_," as it was termed, of the first order; for that species of effrontery called _dashing_ was then in full vogue, as consonant to a state of society, where all in a certain class went by assumption. This lady had arrived rather early in the field, for one whose habits were necessarily on the wrong side of time and of punctuality. She came bowling along, keeping up her fiery steeds to a sort of curvetting gallop, like one deep in the science of the _manège_--now deranging the order of march of the troops, by breaking through the ranks, in spite of the impertinent remonstrances of the out-posts and videttes, at which she laughed, at once to show her teeth and her power;--and now scattering the humble crowd, "like chaff before the wind," as giving her horses the rein, she permitted them to plunge head-long on, while skilfully flourishing her long whip, she made on every side a preliminary clearance. Many among the multitude announced her as the famous Kitty Cut-dash, and nodded knowingly as she passed them; but the greater number detected in the beautiful charioteer, the equally famous Albina Countess Knocklofty, the female chief of that great oligarchical family, the Proudforts--a family on which the church rained mitres, the state coronets, and the people--curses.