Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray
page 9 of 409 (02%)
In Oliver's time it was too late for a chief of the name of Barry to
lift up his war-cry against that of the murderous brewer. We were
princes of the land no longer; our unhappy race had lost its
possessions a century previously, and by the most shameful treason.
This I know to be the fact, for my mother has often told me the
story, and besides had worked it in a worsted pedigree which hung up
in the yellow saloon at Barryville where we lived.

That very estate which the Lyndons now possess in Ireland was once
the property of my race. Rory Barry of Barryogue owned it in
Elizabeth's time, and half Munster beside. The Barry was always in
feud with the O'Mahonys in those times; and, as it happened, a
certain English colonel passed through the former's country with a
body of men-at-arms, on the very day when the O'Mahonys had made an
inroad upon our territories, and carried off a frightful plunder of
our flocks and herds.

This young Englishman, whose name was Roger Lyndon, Linden, or
Lyndaine, having been most hospitably received by the Barry, and
finding him just on the point of carrying an inroad into the
O'Mahonys' land, offered the aid of himself and his lances, and
behaved himself so well, as it appeared, that the O'Mahonys were
entirely overcome, all the Barrys' property restored, and with it,
says the old chronicle, twice as much of the O'Mahonys' goods and
cattle.

It was the setting in of the winter season, and the young soldier
was pressed by the Barry not to quit his house of Barryogue, and
remained there during several months, his men being quartered with
Barry's own gallowglasses, man by man in the cottages round about.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge