In the days when Christian Talbot-Lowry was a little girl, that is to
say between the eighties and nineties of the nineteenth century, the
class known as Landed Gentry was still pre-eminent in Ireland. Tenants
and tradesmen bowed down before them, with love sometimes, sometimes
with hatred, never with indifference. The newspapers of their
districts recorded their enterprises in marriage, in birth, in death,
copiously, and with a servile rapture of detail that, though it is not
yet entirely withheld from their survivors, is now bestowed with equal
unction on those who, in many instances, have taken their places,
geographically, if not their place, socially, in Irish every-day
existence. There is little doubt but that after the monsters of the
Primal Periods had been practically extinguished, a stray reptile,
here and there, escaped the general doom, and, as Mr. Yeats says of
his lug-worm, may have-sung with "its grey and muddy mouth" of how
"somewhere to North or West or South, there dwelt a gay, exulting,
gentle race" of Plesiosauridæ, or Pterodactyli. Even thus may this
record be regarded; as partial, perhaps, but as founded on the facts
of a not wholly to be condemned past.

Christian's father, Richard Talbot-Lowry, was a good-looking,
long-legged, long-moustached Major, who, conforming beautifully to
type, was a soldier, sportsman, and loyalist, as had been his
ancestors before him. He had fought in the Mutiny as a lad of
nineteen, and had been wounded in the thigh in a cavalry charge in a
subsequent fight on the Afghan Frontier. Dick, like Horatius, "halted
upon one knee" for the rest of his life, but since the injury gave him
no trouble in the saddle, and did not affect the sit of his trousers,
he did not resent it, and possibly enjoyed its occasional exposition