He contemplated it for some time in a kind of reverie.  There, it stood, sombre and silent;—­its gray walls mouldering away—­its windows dark and broken;—­like a man forsaken by the world, compelled to bear the storms of life without the hand of a friend to support him, though age and decay render him less capable of enduring them.  For a momont fancy repeopled it;—­again the stir of life, pastime, mirth, and hospitality echoed within its walls; the train of his long departed relatives returned; the din of rude and boisterous enjoyment peculiar to the times; the cheerful tumult of the hall at dinner; the family feuds and festivities; the vanities and the passions of those who now slept in dust;—­all—­all came before him once more, and played their part in the vision of the moment!

As he walked on, the flitting wing of a bat struck him lightly in its flight; he awoke from the remembrances which crowded on him, and, resuming his journey, soon arrived at the inn of the nearest town, where he stopped that night.  The next morning he saw his agent for a short time, but declined entering upon business.  For a few days more he visited most of the neighboring gentry, from whom he received sufficient information to satisfy him that neither he himself nor his agent was popular among his tenantry.  Many flying reports of the agent’s dishonesty and tyranny were mentioned to him, and in every instance he took down the names of the parties, in order to ascertain the truth.  M’Evoy’s case had occurred more than ten years before, but he found that the remembrance of the poor man’s injury was strongly and bitterly retained in the recollections of the people—­a circumstance which extorted from the blunt, but somewhat sentimental soldier, a just observation:—­“I think,” said he, “that there are no people in the world who remember either an injury or a kindness so long as the Irish.”

When the tenants were apprised of his presence among them, they experienced no particular feeling upon the subject.  During all his former visits to his estate, he appeared merely the creature and puppet of his agent, who never acted the bully, nor tricked himself out in his brief authority more imperiously than he did before him.  The knowledge of this damped them, and rendered any expectations of redress or justice from the landlord a matter not to be thought of.

“If he wasn’t so great a man,” they observed, “who thinks it below him to speak to his tenants, or hear their complaints, there ’ud be some hope.  But that rip of hell, Yallow Sam, can wind him round his finger like a thread, an’ does, too.  There’s no use in thinkin’ to petition him, or to lodge a complaint against Stony Heart, for the first thing he’d do ‘ud be to put it into the yallow-boy’s hands, an’ thin, God be marciful to thim that ’ud complain.  No, no; the best way is to wait till Sam’s masther* takes him; an’ who knows but that ’ud be sooner nor we think.”

     * The devil;—­a familiar name for him when mentioned in
     connection with a villain.