For reasons darkly and inextricably mixed up with the Sunday School excursion, dinner that night was served at nine o'clock, and as I was aware that every servant in the house was in a separate and towering passion, I refrained from inquiry.
Yet, even through the indigestion following on this belated repast, I was upheld by the remembrance of Bat's face, as he glared at me through the bars of the kitchen garden gate, and said:
"Thanks be to God, I'm after breaking six pay-sticks on their backs!"
OUT OF HAND
Soldiers were there to keep the peace. The redcoats and the bayonets moved in a rigid line through the crowd that blocked the two streets of the town. They guarded a small body of voters that had come across Lough Corrib, and was making its way to the polling-booths, headed by a Galway landlord, on whose arm leaned an old man, decrepit, and unnerved by the storm of opposition through which they passed.
Another Galway landlord was ranging through groups of men who turned their backs on him, and hid behind each other, his tenants, personal friends all of them, who, for the first time on record, had voted in opposition to his wishes.
"Every one of them!" he said, while the atmosphere that surrounds suffering and strong emotion made itself felt, "all but two or three. They have all gone against me."
It was a memorable election, marking the new departure in Irish politics, and it broke the hearts and practically ended the lives of two at least of the Galway landlords. Till that time the landlords took their tenants to the poll en masse; thenceforward they were to advance under the banner of the Church.
The epoch that here found its close was memorable, too, in its way. It held, far back in it, the brave days when the Galway elections lasted for a month, and the actual voting for a week, days to which the pages of Lever bear witness. As that week of delightful warfare strove on the electors became more fastidious about their drinks, and would accept nothing less aristocratic than mulled port and claret. These restoratives were brewed in fish-kettles on the big fireplaces of the ballroom in Kilroy's hotel, an agreeable incident, not, we think, commemorated by Lever.
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