It will be a restoration, and not a new elevation.' She was a fine, handsome, fearless girl, whom many said ought to have been a boy; but this was rather intended as a covert slight on the narrower nature and peevish temperament of her brother--another way, indeed, of saying that they should have exchanged conditions.
The listless indolence of her father's life, and the almost complete absence from home of her brother, who was pursuing his studies at the Dublin University, had given over to her charge not only the household, but no small share of the management of the estate--all, in fact, that an old land-steward, a certain Peter Gill, would permit her to exercise; for Peter was a very absolute and despotic Grand-Vizier, and if it had not been that he could neither read nor write, it would have been utterly impossible to have wrested from him a particle of power over the property.

This happy defect in his education--happy so far as Kate's rule was concerned--gave her the one claim she could prefer to any superiority over him, and his obstinacy could never be effectually overcome, except by confronting him with a written document or a column of figures.

Before these, indeed, he would stand crestfallen and abashed.

Some strange terror seemed to possess him as to the peril of opposing himself to such inscrutable testimony--a fear, be it said, he never felt in contesting an oral witness.
Peter had one resource, however, and I am not sure that a similar stronghold has not secured the power of greater men and in higher functions.

Peter's sway was of so varied and complicated a kind; the duties he discharged were so various, manifold, and conflicting; the measures he took with the people, whose destinies were committed to him, were so thoroughly devised, by reference to the peculiar condition of each man--what he could do, or bear, or submit to--and not by any sense of justice; that a sort of government grew up over the property full of hitches, contingencies, and compensations, of which none but the inventor of the machinery could possibly pretend to the direction.