"Oh, is that you, Mr. ——?" rising from an absorbed examination of his last bull's-eye. "Mrs. O'Shea was telling me when we started this match of your being such a good shot with a gun. Do have a shot with my revolver; see here, I've got a bull's-eye five times running against Mrs. O'Shea's one. Now let us see what you can do."
Mr. —— hesitated; he was a fine shot and had won prizes in his youth, and was susceptible to flattery.
Mr. Parnell said dryly: "I don't suppose you have had so much practice as I lately, but—" The bailiff turned a wary eye on his wife, who was waiting for him at the gate of a rookery some way off, and Mr. Parnell smiled as he said: "The lady will not see you," in such a gently sarcastic manner that Mr. —— was nettled, and picking up the revolver shot so wildly that he missed the little target altogether.
I said: "Mr. —— can shoot, really, Mr. Parnell, as I told you, but he is nervous!" So Mr. —— went on, making shot after shot with varying success till Mrs. —— appeared on the scene dressed in her best and Sunday virtue, which was resplendent in Eltham. She gazed with pain upon Mr. ——, who, to appear at ease, entered into a discussion of revolver patterns with Mr. Parnell. I talked cheerfully to her for a few moments, and introduced Mr. Parnell, which gratified her immensely, and the two went off happy, but so conscious of the enormity of having given countenance to such desecration of the Sabbath, in Sunday shooting, that we knew we were safe from their perhaps inconvenient chatter.
Mr. Parnell was always interested in cricket, and I had a private pitch laid out for him at Eltham in a two-acre field. As a young man he had been an enthusiast, and the captain of his eleven. He never went to matches, however, after he entered Parliament.
He talked to me much about Avondale. He loved the place, and was never tired of planning the alterations and improvements he meant to make in the old house when we could marry. He often went over to Ireland expressly to see how things were going there, but after 1880 he could never stay even a few days there in peace. The after-effects of the awful famine, in such terrible cases of poverty and woe as were brought to his notice the moment he arrived in his old home, made it impossible for him to remain there at all. No one man could deal charitably with all these poor people and live, and as time went on Mr. Parnell's visits became necessarily shorter, for the demands were so many, and the poverty so great, that he could not carry the burden and continue the political life necessary to their alleviation. He told me that he despaired of ever having a penny in his pocket when he took me there, as he always hoped to do.
He was very fond of the old woman he kept at Avondale in charge of the house, and who attended to his few needs when he was there; and whenever he went there he would get me to go to Fortnum and Mason's to buy a pound of their 4s. a pound tea for the old dame, who much appreciated this delicious tea, though she of course stewed it into poison before drinking it.
This old servant of his had the most curious ideas on "first aid to the injured," and when on one occasion Mr. Parnell had his hand crushed in some machinery at his Arklow quarries, she dressed the injured fingers with cobwebs from the cellar walls. To my astonishment he asked for cobwebs at Eltham once, when he had cut his finger, to "wrap it in." My children, with delighted interest, produced cobwebs (and spiders) from the cellar, and I had the greatest difficulty in preventing a "cure" so likely to produce blood-poisoning. He accepted the peasant lore of Ireland with the simplicity of a child, and I still remember his doubtful "Is that so?" when I told him it was most dangerous to put anything so dusty as a cobweb on an open wound. "Susan Gaffney said cobwebs would stop the poison. They all do it," meaning the peasants.
On August 16th, 1882, he was presented with the freedom of the City of Dublin. He wished to avoid a public demonstration, but the Corporation insisted on making the most of the occasion.
MORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN,
Saturday, August 20, 1882.