Ireland,--which is very different, let me tell you, from the best
anybody ever saw in England."

There were some who thought, if Mrs. Elmsdale could tolerate her
sister's company, she might without difficulty have condoned her
husband's want of acquaintance with some points of grammar and
etiquette; and who said, amongst themselves, that whereas he only
maltreated, Miss Blake mangled every letter in the alphabet; but these
carping critics were in the minority.

Mrs. Elmsdale was a beauty, and a martyr; Mr. Elmsdale a rough beast,
who had no capacity of ever developing into a prince. Miss Blake was a
model of sisterly affection, and if eccentric in her manner, and
bewildering in the vagaries of her accent, well, most Irish people, the
highest in rank not excepted, were the same. Why, there was Lord
So-and-so, who stated at a public meeting that "roight and moight were
not always convartible tarms"; and accepted the cheers and laughter
which greeted his utterance as evidence that he had said something
rather neat.

Miss Blake's accent was a very different affair indeed from those
wrestles with his foe in which her brother-in-law always came off
worsted. He endured agonies in trying to call himself Elmsdale, and
rarely succeeded in styling his wife anything except Mrs. HE. I am told
Miss Blake's mimicry of this peculiarity was delicious: but I never was
privileged to hear her delineation, for, long before the period when
this story opens, Mr. Elmsdale had departed to that land where no
confusion of tongues can much signify, and where Helmsdale no doubt
served his purpose just as well as Miss Blake's more refined
pronunciation of his name.