“the best horsemen and the most accomplished swordsmen in the province,” tells us that the Teelings “were proverbial for their love of small, perfectly shaped, high-bred horses,” and refers to stories, still current in the County of Meath, of the incredibly short time in which they used to ride from their home to Dublin, on their beautiful little horses. “White with green facings their retainers did wear And the young cavaliers were beloved of the fair.”[47] Footnote 47: Luke Teeling was looked on as a remarkably good judge of a horse, and I find among the family papers not a few in which his friends seek his advice on that all important subject. The young men were born soldiers, and more than one effort was made by officers and others of the highest rank to induce them to enter the English army. The Marquis of Hertford, dining one day with Mr. Teeling, promised his influence to get Charles into the Guards, and pledged his powerful support towards his advancement. Luke Teeling replied that, as far as he was concerned, his son was free to accept the flattering offer—but to the surprise of the Marquis, it was declined by Charles himself. In truth, the boy, who though younger in years than Bartholomew or George, had ripened earlier than they, had turned his thoughts in a direction not very likely to end in a Commission in the English Army. While Bartle still dallied in the pleasant ways of youth, and George was away in Dublin,[48] Charles was thrown largely into his father’s company, and imbibed the political views which the circumstances of the time forced on a man of Mr. Teeling’s logical and just mind. Though it is not said in so many words, we gather that Bartle and his father did not quite understand each other. The younger Bartle tells us that his namesake “scarcely brooked the restraint which the stoical and somewhat severe principles of his father imposed upon him; but to his mother, whose idol he was, and to his sisters, he was warmly and tenderly attached. There was no youthful adventure too daring or even extravagant for him; but nothing which inflicted pain, or which trifled with human misery ever had his countenance.” He was fond of books, too, a diligent student of the Classics, and a devotee of Shakespeare and perhaps these tastes helped to keep him for a longer time than his brother a sojourner in those regions of the Ideal where the call of the Real resoundeth not. The day was to come, indeed, and speedily, too, when the cry of his suffering country was to ring as loudly in Bartle’s ear as it had long rung in that of Charles. And how he was to answer it all men know. Footnote 48: They were both apprenticed in the linen trade. Bartle with his father, and George with the MacDonnells in Dublin.