The die is cast. Although Frederick, as the new Earl, attempts to have it both ways and pull a Duke of Windsor (in a century before Wally Simpson's disruption of the monarchy), his proposal to leave the property to his brother and take Kate to Europe and marry her there is scorned by his brother and by the priest who advises Kate and her mother. And so the young Earl finds himself on the cliffs of Moher, near the edge and confronted by the mother of the woman he has deflowered and deceived. Trollope framed his story by introducing us to a madwoman in a private asylum in western England, who cornered everyone she met with her mantra, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." The narrator then reassures the reader that there will be no more of the asylum story, but there will be the story of how the woman happened to come there; and the reader thus knows in advance that this will be a story with a violent ending. It's a relatively short (160 pages) novel with a single thread that leads the players to their fate. They are not presented as bad people. The reader can have some sympathy for each of them as they make their way along, overmatched and overshadowed by the overwhelming Cliffs of Moher and the binding institutions of the time. WHAT HAPPENS IN AUSTRALIA . . . JOHN CALDIGATE Anthony Trollope sailed to Australia in 1871 to visit his son Fred. (He wrote one novel, _Lady Anna_, during eight weeks of the voyage out.) While visiting a goldfield in Currajong, New South Wales, he met one of his son's school mates who had visited in the Trollope home. As he described it in _Australia and New Zealand_ (1876): I saw him in front of his little tent, which he occupied in partnership with an experienced working miner, eating a beefsteak out of his frying-pan with his claspknife. . . . He had no friend near him but his mining friend,--or mate, as he called him. . . . He had been softly nurtured, well educated, and was a handsome fellow to boot; and there he was eating a nauseous lump of beef out of a greasy frying-pan with his pocketknife, just in front of the contiguous blankets stretched on the ground, which constituted the beds of himself and his companion. It may be that he will strike gold, and make a fortune.