The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent Part 10

'What do you think I pay taxes for? It's your business to be able to tell me the way to heaven. As for the bally parsons, they don't understand.'

A broad smile came over the constable's face.

'Were you asking where you could get blind drunk comfortably, sir?

because if so--'

And out came the hint with a wink.

Wilde was fond of that tale at one time.

The affair of ''48' was a farce. Stimulated by the French Revolution, John Mitchel wrote rabid sedition, but received short shrift at the hands of the Government, who arrested him, sentenced him to fourteen years' transportation, and almost from the dock he was taken manacled in a police van, escorted by cavalry, and put on board a steamer, which at once put out to sea.

Smith O'Brien was the leader of this feeble insurrection. He had boasted he would be at the head of fifty thousand Tipperary men. Instead his army consisted of a few hundred half-clad ragam.u.f.fins, which attacked a squad of police who took refuge in a farmhouse, and easily routed the rabble.

Smith O'Brien proved himself an arrant coward. He hid in a cabbage garden, and is still believed to have made his temporary escape from the police in the habit of an Anglican sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon.

Mrs. Monsell, was Mother Superior.

The bigger outbreak was not a bit more serious. It was all trumped up by the Irish in America, and their reliance upon help from American soldiers was destroyed after the war. This agitation was the one known as the work of the Phoenix Society, and the object was the separation of Ireland from England and the confiscation of Irish property.

The leaders were James Stephens, who had nearly escaped being shot by a policeman in the Smith O'Brien campaign, and that indomitable scoundrel O'Donovan Rossa. It was at this time we began to hear of mysterious strangers. In this case it was Stephens; later Parnell wrapped himself in strange isolation; and subsequently Tynan, who was known as 'Number One.'

Cork and Kerry were the chosen parts of Ireland for the new Fenianism to come to a head, and a certain amount of enrolling and drilling did take place.

I was then residing within two miles of the city of Cork, and one night the Fenians came out and encamped all round my house, without offering the slightest molestation or injury to anybody.

Two Fenians walked into the house of my stableman, about a quarter of a mile from my own, and asked for food, saying they were ready to pay for it.

The woman replied that she had no food in the house, but the breakfast of her brother Charles, which she was about to take to him in the stables.

They wanted to pay her a s.h.i.+lling for it, but she declined, and then they went away quietly.

The princ.i.p.al outbreak was to be in Killarney, and they plotted to attack the police barrack at Cahirciveen, because they had an ally in the son of the head constable.

But a man in the town, to whom he had shown kindness, warned the head constable of the attack, which in the end consisted of a few shots fired by a ragged rabble of about three hundred, half of whom were half-hearted, and the other half half-drunk.

The coastguards manned their boat and rowed off to a gunboat in the harbour to ask for some marines; and the moment this was known to the besiegers they dispersed. Some of them marched rather downcast towards Killarney, and on the road they met a mounted policeman riding to warn Cahirciveen of the attack which was to be made against the barracks, for every movement of this silly rebellion was known to the Government.

They called on the man to stop and deliver up his despatches. He declined to do so, and so soon as he had ridden on they shot him in the back, wounding him badly.

He recovered, but was very shabbily treated by the Government, who only awarded him a miserably small pension, a n.i.g.g.ardly act which aroused much dissatisfaction.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Killarney, Doctor Moriarty, protested strongly against the cowardice of the Fenians, who were afraid to face one armed man, and waited until his back was turned before they shot him.

However, as I have indicated, the Fenian movement was very insignificant, and was known in all its aspects to the Government, which dealt pretty roughly with it.

It is a singular fact that in the Fenian councils Killarney should have been selected for the outbreak.

This is a town where nearly all the landed proprietors were Roman Catholics, where there was a Catholic Bishop, a monastery and two convents, while one half-ruined Protestant church sufficed to accommodate the few wors.h.i.+ppers who sat under a dreary, inoffensive vicar on a very small salary. All reasonable folk, moreover, know that Killarney is the town to which, more than any other in Ireland, it is important to attract British tourists.

It was well known that some of the promoters and instigators of the movement betrayed it before its very inception to the Government; and Bishop Moriarty, from his pulpit, in his sermon alluded in no measured language to those criminals who instigated the innocent peasants to play a part in this mock insurrection, and then betrayed them.

He concluded:--

'It may be a hard saying, but surely h.e.l.l is not too hot nor eternity too long for the punishment of such villainy.'

Yet the whole of Irish history is disfigured by the poisonous trail of the insidious informer.

I was in Kerry at the time of the Cahirciveen fizzle, in the neighbourhood of Dingle, and it was rumoured that the insurrection was to be general.

That was not my opinion, for I travelled on an open car by myself, with a large quant.i.ty of money, and no other weapon than an umbrella.

It was a very different state of affairs in the distress caused by Mr.

Gladstone's legislation, for then I never travelled without a revolver, and occasionally was accompanied by a Winchester rifle. I used to place my revolver as regularly beside my fork on the dinner-table, either in my own or in anybody else's house, as I spread my napkin on my knees.

And yet it is strangely difficult to see any other cause than Mr.

Gladstone's Acts for such ill-feeling.

As my sworn evidence, on which I was cross-examined in the Parnell Commission, showed, I had only ten evictions in six years among two thousand tenants.

I should like to ask, in what cla.s.s of life is there not more than one in twelve hundred that gets into financial troubles in a year?

In the insurance world such a ratio of claims to premiums would make a perfect fortune to the companies.

The tenants were not a.s.sociated with the Fenian movement at all, the outbreak being solely confined to the townsfolk, which, in Ireland, helped to make it a feeble affair. I did not know one _bona fide_ farmer that was connected with the movement, and though the arms were mainly smuggled in from America, mighty little hard cash came to the pockets of any but the leaders.

Stephens was the original 'Number One,' and he was let out of Kilmainham by the chief warder's wife. No one knew where he was to be found, but the police, who were well aware that he was devoted to his own wife, kept a strict watch on her, and eventually caught him through his opening communications with her.

When the hue and cry was loudest, it was reported he had come to Cork to foster the Fenian movement, and that he was disguised in feminine garb.

One day my wife found her steps dogged by a man in the most aggravating way, for he followed her into three shops without attempting to speak to her, his only desire being to shadow her, which he was doing in the most clumsy manner.

I was away at Dingle for the day, so my wife went into the establishment of the leading linen-draper, and sending for the head of the firm, asked him to speak to the man, who was then pretending to buy some tape.

It turned out that he was a detective fresh from Dublin, who had taken it into his head that she was Stephens, and was most apologetic, as well as crestfallen, at his error.

Some time after this Fenian fizzle, my coachman saw a number of people being chased by the police for drilling; and about two years later, when I sent him to the Cork barracks on private business, he told me that he there noticed some of the very people who had been routed by the constabulary, but this time they were being drilled by the Government as militia.

I have always had a theory that Ireland was created by Providence for the express purpose of bothering philosophers, and preventing them or politicians from thinking themselves too wise.

At the time when the Fenian scare was damaging Killarney as a tourist resort, Sir Michael Morris--as he then was--was staying at Morley's Hotel in London, and saw in the American paper lying on the table a vivid account of how the Fenian army had attacked a British garrison, and would have easily captured the stronghold had not an overpowering force of English cavalry and artillery hurried up to deliver the besieged.

Of course, the facts were, that in County Limerick several hundred 'patriots,' led by a man in a green calico uniform, attacked a police barrack in which were five constables. Keeping as much out of range of the constabulary fire as possible, they had exchanged a few shots when a District Inspector of Police, who resided some eight miles off, arrived with ten constables on a couple of cars, at the sight of which stupendous relieving force, the whole corps of young Irishmen bolted.

Morris gave the waiter a s.h.i.+lling for the paper--and took it off his tip at leaving, no doubt--and carefully treasured the journal until he went to hold the next a.s.sizes at Limerick, when he found the bulk of the attacking army in the dock before him.

When the D.I. was giving evidence, Morris asked him:--

'Where were the British cavalry?'