might have held less despairing views; but, of course, he did not interrupt this feebly tempestuous monologue.
"—We are all played out, that is the fact—the soil is exhausted—we want a great national upheaval—a new condition of things—a social revolution, in short. And we're going to get it" he continued, in a sort of triumphant way; "there's no mistake about that; the social revolution is in the air, it is under our feet, it is pressing in upon us from every side; and yet at the very moment that the aristocracy have got notice to quit their deer-forests and their salmon-rivers and grouse-moors, they so far mistake the signs of the times that they think they should be devoting themselves to art and going on the stage! Was there ever such incomprehensible madness?"
"I hope they won't sweep away deer-forests and grouse-moors just all at once," the young baritone said, modestly, "for I am asked to go to the Highlands at the beginning of next August."
"Make haste, then, and see the last of these doomed institutions" observed Mr. Quirk, with dark significance, as he looked up from his steak and onions. "I tell you deer-forests are doomed; grouse-moors are doomed; salmon-rivers are doomed. They are a survival of feudal rights and privileges which the new democracy—the new ruling power—will make short work of. The time has gone by for all these absurd restrictions and reservations! There is no defence for them; there never was; they were conceived in an iniquity of logic which modern common-sense will no longer suffer. Bona vacantia can't belong to anybody—therefore they belong to the king; that's a pretty piece of reasoning, isn't it? And if the crofter or the laborer says, 'Bona vacantia can't belong to anybody—therefore they belong to me'—isn't the reasoning as good? But it is not merely game-laws that must be abolished, it is game itself."
"If you abolish the one, you'll soon get rid of the other," Maurice Mangan said, with a kind of half-contemptuous indifference; he was examining this person in a curious way, as he might have looked through the wires of a cage in the Zoological Gardens.
"Both must be abolished," Mr. Octavius Quirk continued, with windy vehemence. "The very distinction that takes any animal feræ naturæ and constitutes it game is a relic of class privilege and must go—"
"Then Irish landlords will no longer be considered feræ naturæ?" Mangan asked, incidentally.
"We must be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediæval chains and manacles that the Norman kings imposed on a conquered people. We must be as free as the United States of America—"
"America!" Mangan said; and he was rude enough to laugh. "The State of New York has more stringent game-laws than any European country that I know of; and why not? They wanted to preserve certain wild animals, for the general good; and they took the only possible way."
Quirk was disconcerted only for a moment; presently he had resumed, in his reckless, mouton-enragé fashion,