Early this month, I made a little foot tour in Ireland. Everybody said, “Don’t go!” Even in Dublin, a friend warned me, saying: “It is a terrible time in Ireland. Landlords are being murdered and farmers locked up in prison. You are a stranger here. The English soldiers, on the watch everywhere, will take you for an American Fenian. The Irish will take you for an English spy.”
It was all a mistake, as to myself at least. I went everywhere unmolested. True, the tourists were frightened out of the country. British redcoats were being sent up and down the island looking for “boycotters” and assassins. The people everywhere were sullen, and ominous silence reigned in many places. The country seemed to be sitting on a volcano. I often walked miles on country roads without meeting a soul, and nobody at all dared to be abroad at night. At little country inns where I stopped, people did not talk about the situation. I suppose they dared not.
By accident I picked up a newspaper one day and read a warning signed by New York Fenians against any one’s traveling to Europe on an English steamer. “They would blow them all up.” To my horror another item told how an “infernal machine” was believed to have been put on board the “Adriatic,” that had sailed on the 8th. This might go off in mid-ocean and destroy the ship. My wife and two children were on board that vessel, and the ship had sailed. There was nothing to do but wait, and fear. Besides, it did not seem possible to me that the friends of Ireland could resort to such crimes. In Ireland itself, however, there was little respect for law, and for England none at all.
Once I was on a railroad train near Mallow. I was in the third class, because there I could see the common people. A Fenian, out of jail that very morning, sat next to me. He would not talk about the government, but constantly asked me to “look out at the green fields”--they were so beautiful to him after months of imprisonment.
Many redcoat soldiers, in charge of prisoners wearing handcuffs, were on the train. The prisoners yelled: “Down with England! Hurrah for free Ireland!” and sang the “Wearing of the Green.” The soldiers could not help themselves and simply laughed.
The train stopped at a little country village and I saw a great mass of people running towards us. The soldiers said they were coming to stone the train. I wished now that I had listened to the “warnings.” Instead of stoning us, however, the mob rushed into the car where I was, seized the man by my side and bore him out on their shoulders. The men hugged him, the women kissed him, and everybody cried for “free Ireland.” It was his welcome home from prison. The redcoats said nothing and did nothing. As the train moved on, I could see the mob still carrying the man up the street, while the village band marched at their head.
I wanted to go to Limerick for the races next day, but I saw a train with three hundred armed and uniformed policemen going to the same place, so I stayed away, and took to the quiet and safer country roads.
I passed lovely scenes in the neighborhood of Killarney. The lakes equal the Swiss lakes in beauty; there are bright waterfalls there, groves, grand estates, ruined castles, and wretched poverty.
Saw Muckross Abbey by moonlight--nothing more romantic conceivable. The grand old trees, the broken arches, the ivy-covered walls, the graveyard with its bones of long-dead Irish kings, all silent and lone under the soft light of a summer moon, impressed me.
A young Irishman and his newly wedded wife, stopping at the inn, had joined me in the wish to see Muckross by moonlight. We walked down the road to the entrance of the ground. The care taker at the gate was upstairs in the lodge in bed. When we called to him to unlock the gate, he poked his head out of a window and ordered us away instantly. We offered him good pay to come down and let us into the grounds. “Not for a dozen pounds would I come down there,” he yelled back at us. “How do I know what you are or who you be, tramping around the roads this time of night. You might be going to blow the top of the head off of me. I tell you go along wid you.” We went along further down the road, climbed over into the enclosure, and without blowing off tops of heads of anybody, had a good time. We knew the man would not venture from his lodge. His fear showed the kind of times Ireland was living in.