Kelly’s Court was restored to such respectability as could ever belong to so ugly a place.  It was a large red stone mansion, standing in a demesne of very poor ground, ungifted by nature with any beauty, and but little assisted by cultivation or improvement.  A belt of bald-looking firs ran round the demesne inside the dilapidated wall; but this was hardly sufficient to relieve the barren aspect of the locality.  Fine trees there were none, and the race of O’Kellys had never been great gardeners.

Captain O’Kelly was a man of more practical sense, or of better education, than most of his family, and he did do a good deal to humanise the place.  He planted, tilled, manured, and improved; he imported rose-trees and strawberry-plants, and civilised Kelly’s Court a little.  But his reign was not long.  He died about five years after he had begun his career as a country gentleman, leaving a widow and two daughters in Ireland; a son at school at Eton; and an expensive lawsuit, with numerous ramifications, all unsettled.

Francis, the son, went to Eton and Oxford, was presented at Court by his grandfather, and came hack to Ireland at twenty-two, to idle away his time till the old lord should die.  Till this occurred, he could neither call himself the master of the place, nor touch the rents.  In the meantime, the lawsuits were dropped, both parties having seriously injured their resources, without either of them obtaining any benefit.  Barry Lynch was recalled from his English education, where he had not shown off to any great credit; and both he and his father were obliged to sit down prepared to make the best show they could on eight hundred pounds a-year, and to wage an underhand internecine war with the O’Kellys.

Simeon and his son, however, did not live altogether alone.  Anastasia Lynch was Barry’s sister, and older than him by about ten years.  Their mother had been a Roman Catholic, whereas Sim was a Protestant; and, in consequence, the daughter had been brought up in the mother’s, and the son in the father’s religion.  When this mother died, Simeon, no doubt out of respect to the memory of the departed, tried hard to induce his daughter to prove her religious zeal, and enter a nunnery; but this, Anty, though in most things a docile creature, absolutely refused to do.  Her father advised, implored, and threatened; but in vain; and the poor girl became a great thorn in the side of both father and son.  She had neither beauty, talent, nor attraction, to get her a husband; and her father was determined not to encumber his already diminished property with such a fortune as would make her on that ground acceptable to any respectable suitor.

Poor Anty led a miserable life, associating neither with superiors nor inferiors, and her own position was not sufficiently declared to enable her to have any equals.  She was slighted by her father and the servants, and bullied by her brother; and was only just enabled, by humble, unpresuming disposition, to carry on her tedious life from year to year without grumbling.