"Oh, indispensable! positively indispensable!" cried Lady Dashfort;
"no living in Ireland without it. You know, in every country in the
world, you must live with the people of the country, or be torn to
pieces: for my part, I should prefer being torn to pieces."

Lady Dashfort and Lady Isabel knew how to take advantage of the
contrast between their own conversation, and that of the persons by
whom Lord Colambre was so justly disgusted: they happily relieved his
fatigue with wit, satire, poetry, and sentiment; so that he every day
became more exclusively fond of their company; for Lady Killpatrick
and the Miss Killpatricks were mere commonplace people. In the
mornings, he rode or walked with Lady Dashfort and Lady Isabel: Lady
Dashfort, by way of fulfilling her promise of showing him the people,
used frequently to take him into the cabins, and talk to their
inhabitants. Lord and Lady Killpatrick, who had lived always for the
fashionable world, had taken little pains to improve the condition of
their tenants: the few attempts they had made were injudicious. They
had built ornamented, picturesque cottages, within view of their park;
and favourite followers of the family, people with half a century's
habit of indolence and dirt, were _promoted_ to these fine dwellings.
The consequences were such as Lady Dashfort delighted to point out:
every thing let to go to ruin for the want of a moment's care, or
pulled to pieces for the sake of the most surreptitious profit: the
people most assisted always appearing proportionally wretched and
discontented. No one could, with more ease and more knowledge of her
ground, than Lady Dashfort, do the _dishonours_ of a country. In
every cabin that she entered, by the first glance of her eye at the
head, kerchiefed in no comely guise, or by the drawn-down corners of
the mouth, or by the bit of a broken pipe, which in Ireland never
characterizes _stout labour_, or by the first sound of the voice, the