Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 57 CHAPTER III. THE GLENDARES. Twelve Irish miles from Kingslough, meaning fifteen or thereabouts English measurement, stood Eosemont, the ancestral residence of the Earls of Glendare. That fifteen miles' journey took the traveller precisely the same distance from the sea; but it did not matter in the smallest degree to any of the Glendares where the family seat was situated, since they never lived on their own acres whilst a guinea remained to be spent in London or Paris. Once upon a time, as the fairy-books say, the Glendare rent-roll had provided the headof the family with an income of one thousand pounds a day. There were larger rent- rolls in the United Kingdom no doubt, but still a thousand a day can scarcely be considered penury. To the Glendares, however, it merely assumed the shape of pocket-money; as a natural consequence the ancestral revenues proved ultimately totally inadequate to supply the requirements of each successive earl. They married heiresses, they married paupers, with a precisely similar result. The heiresses' wealth was spent, the paupers learned to spend. Gamblers, men and women, they risked the happiness and well-being of their tenants on a throw of the dice. Rents, too high already, were raised on lands the holders had no capital to get more produce out of. " Money ! money ! " was the Glendare refrain; and money scraped together by pence and shillings, money painfully earned in the sweat of men's brows, by the labour of women's hands, went out of the country to keep thosewicked orgies going where my lord, and other lords like him, helped to make a poor land poorer, and milady, all paint, and pride, and sin, played not only diamonds and spades, but the heart's blood of patient men, and the tears and sobs of hopeless women. I... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.