The story moves toward its conclusion in London, where Herbert has gone to study law after leaving Castle Richmond. Here we see two lawyers at work. The first is Mr. Prendergast, the family attorney, who receives a letter revealing the family secret. Mr. Prendergast anticipates Sherlock Holmes in his powers of observation as he enters the house and searches for his quarry: "But the armchair was placed idly away from any accommodation for work, and had, as Mr. Prendergast thought, been recently filled by some idle person."

We also encounter the barrister, Mr. Die, still working hard at age seventy. Men who retire at age sixty, the author tells us, are those who have always been idle. "It is my opinion that nothing seasons the mind for endurance like hard work. Port wine should perhaps be added."

But back to the Irish famine: When one learns that during its four worst years, the English landlords in Ireland exported more food, in the form of beef, wheat, and other grains, than the country imported, one begins to understand the reasons for deep and strong feelings about the English in Ireland. From his travels in southwest Ireland from 1841 to 1859, Trollope surely knew and understood the Irish from the ground up. His fictional account bears as much authority as a journalistic one would have, and it is reinforced in the Folio Society edition with a pen-and-ink drawing opposite page 185 showing a woman dressed in rags, on her knees, surrounded by four small children, pulling at someone's cloak as she begs. She is more attractive in the drawing than in the description—"squat, uncouth, and in no way attractive to the eye."

This begging scene is rural, not on a city street. The woman who is begging is not a nameless beggar; she knows Mister Herbert and Clara by face and name. Other accounts in the book—dealing with the deliberations of the ad hoc council to establish policies about distribution of such food as is available to those without food, managing a gang of men given make-work duties leveling a hill for a roadway, and the details of a recipe for making bread from bad flour—all bear witness to a human tragedy that brought thousands of its victims to America.

Castle Richmond is a good story; it starts slowly, but it moves along, and it proceeds with dispatch in the final chapters. Trollope has given us some sobering glimpses of people, ancestors to many Americans, starving in time of famine; otherwise we are diverted by entertaining views and stories. It's unfortunate that a book so well written is doomed to the oblivion of being just one of forty-seven novels by the same author.

THE LADY FACES THEM DOWN

ORLEY FARM

I can see Barbara Stanwyck playing Lady Mason in a film noir version of Orley Farm. Oh, there was no murder—only a bit of forgery. But remember, forgery could be punished with hanging in England only a few years before Orley Farm was written. The story is a bit complicated: Lady Mason forged a codicil to her late husband's will, leaving a small portion of his land holdings to their only child, taking this small home place away from his older son by a previous marriage.

Now we know that in England at that time all inheritance was to go to the eldest son as a matter of course, unless other provision was made. And we in this age are accustomed to the "pre-nup," the prenuptial agreement designed to deal with the anxieties of prospective heirs when an aged parent takes a wife—especially if the wife be of childbearing age.