ORANGE AND GREEN
The crowd surged and muttered. It was extraordinarily still for an Irish mob. No man spoke to his neighbor, but all kept their eyes steadfastly fixed on the vanishing lines of the railway; nevertheless, through the whole mass there ran the troubled undertone, the uneasy stir of a ground-swell in the Atlantic. Every minute men came dropping in by twos and threes and took their places in the serried ranks, till the cut leading to the railway station of Lisnamore was packed from end to end with two banks of solid humanity, leaving a broad avenue down the middle. Each man, as he fell into his place, bent his eyes upon the horizon, and assumed the same attitude of tense and feverish expectation.
It was the twelfth of July, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. The manufacturers of the distant town of Belrush had selected the Northern day of rejoicing to give a holiday to their mill-hands, and by some unlucky chance the workmen had chosen to spend the day by the seaside at Lisnamore. Two train-loads of them were coming—six hundred Catholics and six hundred Protestants. So the Catholics of Lisnamore and the surrounding districts were now assembled in their thousands to express their disapprobation of the indecent presence of Orangemen in their town upon that day. Every fist held an ash-plant or a blackthorn stick, and every pocket was filled with jagged pieces of limestone.
Suddenly a rumor—a whisper—flashed down the ranks and died out like a sigh: 'The polis.'
The rhythm of disciplined feet crept upon the ear; and the dark-green tunics and brown rifle-barrels of the Royal Irish Constabulary rounded the corner and came into view. Amid a silence of death they marched steadily up the centre of the avenue—twenty-four stalwart men and their officer—and behind them rode the resident magistrate on his big roan horse.
Straight up the cut they strode, until they reached the mouth of the station-yard, and then came the order sharp and decisive,—
'Right wheel!—Halt!—Front turn!—'Tention!—Ready!—Fix swords!—With buckshot—Load!'
The policemen were now between the crowd and their approaching victims. The two lines of glittering bayonets rose aloft in the sunlight; and as the snap of the rifle breeches ceased upon the sullen air, the magistrate raised his voice and said in a dry, official tone,—
'I call upon this meeting to disperse.'