Pleasant, too, for their charming daughter of nineteen, to think that she hereafter shall not ask in vain for that tour in Switzerland, that ball at home, those boxes, varying in shape and size; small, from the stores of Howell and of James; medium, from Messieurs Hill and Piver; and large, very large, from “the infallible Mrs. Murray,” and Jane Clark, in the Street of the Regent.
Enlivening, moreover, for that Eton boy to believe, as he salutes the Blarney Stone, that now he has only to give the Governor a hint, and “that clipping little horse of young Farmer Smith's” will be purchased forthwith, and presented to him, to carry him next season with the Belvoir hunt.
Miserable Father, how shall he meet this irresistible incursion upon his purse and peace. Well may he look coldly on the Blarney Stone! Well may he express, from heart and hope, his belief that it's “all humbug.” And yet, methinks, remembering that last Election, that distressingly effete experiment to nominate Sir John Golumpus, that fearful silence, when he came to grief, that vulgar gibe “go 'ome, and tak' a pill,” he too must sigh for this gift of Blarney, and long to kiss the Stone.
See, they are leaving the battlements,--first the Etonian, then his sister, and then Mamma. O, wily Paterfamilias! Suddenly remembering that he “has left his stick” (he has, and purposely), he steps briskly back, and, stooping for his cane,--salutes the rock! He, at all events, won't _“kiss, and tell!”_
But everybody kisses it. The noisy old girl, whom we met yesterday at the _table d'hôte_, and who preferred steel to silver, as a medium for the transmission of food, reached the summit of the tower very short of wind, but resumed, as soon as ever she could speak, a severe sermon upon the errors of “_Room_,” and its superstitions in particular. And yet, ultimately (affecting to do it in ridicule,--let us be charitable, and hope that, in her heart of hearts, she had in view the conversion of her “genteel Aconite”), she kissed the Stone; and we were glad to have already done so.
We saw the kitchen, where beeves were cooked in the merry old times, and the banquet-hall wherein they were carved. The latter was appropriated to a miscellaneous collection of rickety old farming implements,--rust, and dust, and decay, where brave knights laughed over the winecup,--