The Founding of Fortunes Author:Jane Barlow 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: CHAPTER I Pearl-white hawthorn buds were swelling in the fresh green bushes about Kilcashel, when one early April morning an efflorescence of large pinkish ha... more »ndbills appeared on its walls, gates, and other convenient surfaces. They announced the sale of the lands of Kiltavera, Goultrana- sheen, Breachanstown, with half a dozen more names long and difficult, which, however, clearly conveyed to all the neighbourhood that Sir Herbert Considine " was about sellin' every bit of his property." The fact had naturally very various degrees of significance for different people. The centre of acutest interest was up at Shanabawn House, the rambling old mansion with wings and a turret standing high in a nest of trees. Out of them the turret rose with a somewhat stately effect, diminished on a nearer view, as it became apparent that the screen of leaves was held up by crooked and spindly or otherwise unmarketable stems, interspersed with the stumps of many goodlier trunks laid low in days when the necessities of the Considines had raged among them like a storm-blast discriminatingly destructive. This same ill wind was still blowing strongly about the house, though it could no longer bring any fine timber crashing down. Within doors were the persons most concerned. Most deeply, Sir Herbert. To him this business seemed simply one sort of ruin narrowly and no doubt temporarily averted by another. It meant the uprooting of himself from all that was familiarly tolerable in his decadent life; the sweeping away of every security that had enabled him to forecast a fairly well-left future for his wife and daughter; the resurrection, so to speak, vicariously and retributively, of his own early follies; the loss of home and habits, dignity and peace. Since the thing had been settled he had spent most ...« less