thirty years since by the late baronet, with a lawn sloping down to
the river, with kitchen gardens and walls for fruit, with ample
stables, and a clock over the entrance to the stable yard. It stood
in a well timbered park duly stocked with deer,--and with foxes
also, which are agricultural animals much more valuable in an Irish
county than deer. So that as regards its appearance Castle Richmond
might have been in Hampshire or Essex, and as regards his property,
Sir Thomas Fitzgerald might have been a Leicestershire baronet.

Here, at Castle Richmond, lived Sir Thomas with his wife and
daughters, and here, taking the period of our story as being exactly
thirteen years since, his son Herbert was staying also in those hard
winter months, his Oxford degree having been taken, and his English
pursuits admitting of a temporary sojourn in Ireland.

But Sir Thomas Fitzgerald was not the great man of that part of the
country--at least, not the greatest man; nor was Lady Fitzgerald by
any means the greatest lady. As this greatest lady, and the greatest
man also, will, with their belongings, be among the most prominent
of our dramatis personae, it may be well that I should not even say
a word of them.

All the world must have heard of Desmond Court. It is the largest
inhabited residence known in that part of the world, where rumours
are afloat of how it covers ten acres of ground; how in hewing the
stones for it a whole mountain was cut away; how it should have cost
hundreds of thousands of pounds, only that the money was never paid
by the rapacious, wicked, bloodthirsty old earl who caused it to be
erected;--and how the cement was thickened with human blood. So
goes rumour with the more romantic of the Celtic tale-bearers.