connections;--inherited especially a Government Pension, with
survivorship for still one life beyond his own; his father having been
Clerk of the Irish House of Commons at the time of the Union, of which
office the lost salary was compensated in this way. The Pension was
of two hundred pounds; and only expired with the life of Edward,
John's Father, in 1847. There were, and still are, daughters of the
family; but Edward was the only son;--descended, too, from the
Scottish hero Wallace, as the old gentleman would sometimes admonish
him; his own wife, Edward's mother, being of that name, and boasting
herself, as most Scotch Wallaces do, to have that blood in her veins.

This Edward had picked up, at Waterford, and among the young
Beresfords of Curraghmore and elsewhere, a thoroughly Irish form of
character: fire and fervor, vitality of all kinds, in genial
abundance; but in a much more loquacious, ostentatious, much _louder_
style than is freely patronized on this side of the Channel. Of Irish
accent in speech he had entirely divested himself, so as not to be
traced by any vestige in that respect; but his Irish accent of
character, in all manner of other more important respects, was very
recognizable. An impetuous man, full of real energy, and immensely
conscious of the same; who transacted everything not with the minimum
of fuss and noise, but with the maximum: a very Captain Whirlwind, as
one was tempted to call him.

In youth, he had studied at Trinity College, Dublin; visited the Inns
of Court here, and trained himself for the Irish Bar. To the Bar he
had been duly called, and was waiting for the results,--when, in his
twenty-fifth year, the Irish Rebellion broke out; whereupon the Irish
Barristers decided to raise a corps of loyal Volunteers, and a
complete change introduced itself into Edward Sterling's way of life.