And, last of all, the father,[H] who that day would leave behind
Poor helpless children to a world, harsh, pitiless, unkind:
No wonder if he faltered—’twas, oh God! a fearful test;
Yet he met his fate as bravely and as proudly as the rest.
And these are murderers, they say—are cowards, base and vile:
These gallant ones who perished for their distant native isle—
Cowards and murderers, they say; oh, grant us patience, God!
Oh, grant us patience yet to bear the tyrant’s heavy rod.
A TYPICAL TRIAL.
JOSEPH O’GRABALL, ex-Indian police inspector, and previously major in the Boomerang Blazers, has for the past two years looked after the peace and well-being of a southern district in Ireland, which, to avoid offending the sensitive susceptibilities of its loyal squireocracy, I shall designate as Kilslippery, which is about as unlike its real cognomen as any word I am capable of coining. Joseph is unquestionably one of the most energetic of the many remarkably energetic divisional magistrates whose lively imaginations and diseased livers have found temporary fields for exercise in Ireland since the coercion act passed into law.
Major O’Graball is a terror not merely to all evil-doers in the locality decorated by his rubicund nose and enlivened by his oriental profanity, but he has managed to establish himself as an unmitigated nuisance to nine-tenths of the entire population. He possesses the disturbing faculty of becoming “reasonably suspicious” of anybody on the slightest provocation and at the shortest notice. He firmly believes that he can tell an Invincible or a Moonlighter half a mile away by the manner of his stride or the cut of his pants. He perambulates the country-side with a mounted escort daily, and scrutinizes the features of every individual he meets, irrespective of age, sex, garb, or occupation. He is prepared to detect treason in the shape of a nose, read murder and arson in the twinkle of an eye, and discover dynamite in the curl of a mustache.
Christy Connell was a small farmer whose evil fate made his path of life lie in the scope of the major’s inquisitorial vision. Christy was a simple, hard-working man, with such a numerous progeny that there is little fear of the name of Connell ever dying out in those parts unless there’s an earthquake or a volcanic eruption. His task of supporting this battalion of Connells was such a difficult one that he had no leisure to attend to politics or concern himself with the agitation. But the very fact of his constant attention to his farm only served to arouse O’Graball’s suspicion. Why, he argued, should a man keep sober, unless he was afraid to get drunk? and why should he stick so closely to his business, unless he wanted to conceal his treasonable sympathies? Then he wore an American goatee. Suspicious, decidedly suspicious. A goatee is military. Except the goatee, there was nothing military about Christy, for he was bow-legged and squinted. But then his bow-legs might have been induced by cavalry exercise, and his squint would be useful in enabling him to spot an objectionable landlord round the corner.
With O’Graball, to suspect was to act. So one dark April night a sergeant and half-a-dozen of the R. I. C. broke suddenly into Connell’s, and, after one of those clever searches for which that corps is famed, they succeeded in discovering a hatchet, a sledge-hammer, several rusty nails, a rude drawing which appeared utterly incomprehensible to the indefatigable sergeant, and a letter bearing the New York post-mark, which, to the official mind, seemed an invaluable piece of documentary evidence.
“Make haste, Connell,” said the sergeant. “You must come along with us.”
“Musha, phwat for?” queried the bewildered Connell.
“To answer a charge of having unlawfully and illegally planned, devised, and conspired, with seditious, felonious, and treasonable intent, to destroy, deprive, rob, upset, and otherwise confuse Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria of her title and right as sovereign lady of England, Scotland, Ireland, and also Kilslippery, so help me God!” and the sergeant wound up as if he were on oath in the witness-box.