I've never cared very much for junkyard photography. By this I mean rusty plows, abandoned automobiles, houses falling in, storefronts with broken glass. Of course ruins always have a certain appeal; the remains of an old well can be seen beside a trail leading down toward the river from my house. Who knows what happened around that old site? But rust and ruin have a limited appeal. Anthony Trollope encountered the ruins of an old country house on a visit to Drumsna, Ireland, in 1843, while working for the Post Office. As recorded in his autobiography, "It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited . . . and while I was still among the ruined walls and decayed beams I fabricated the plot of _The Macdermots of Ballycloran_." The story that resulted from this visit might do very well to pass away a dull afternoon riding through the country; but I found the leisurely pace of the six hundred page novel tedious. Ruins, ruin, and ruined. This was Trollope's first novel. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had been in Ireland five years, traveling through the countryside as a clerk to a postal surveyor. One of the primary rules for writers is to write about what one knows about, and he did that. But he would have never survived as an author on forty-six more such novels. Over the next decade he was to write two more rather indifferent novels and then begin _The Warden_, the first of the Barsetshire novels and predecessor to _Barchester Towers_, his best known work. It's one thing for a writer to have the requisite skills; it's another thing--whether by chance or design--to hit upon a subject or a character that will "take off." Writers are sometimes surprised by what the public likes and what it doesn't. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looked upon Sherlock Holmes as a distraction from his higher calling as a writer of historical novels, until he realized that Holmes was his meal ticket. Few readers know anything about his historical novels. And for Trollope, the worlds of _Barchester Towers_ and the Pallisers secured his place in English literature. But back to the dreary world of the Macdermots. First, be warned that their story, which doesn't start very well, doesn't end well, either, as a visitor to the ruins of their country house might suspect. Larry Macdermot, reigning patriarch, is on the verge of losing his house, his property and his mind. His daughter Feemy is seduced by the English revenue agent. Larry's son Thady, the central focus of the story, has a violent encounter with Feemy's lover when she is reluctant to elope with him. It's an unhappy time for the clan.