Dead Man's Island.
THE STORY OF AN IRISH COUNTRY TOWN.
T. P. O'Connor, M. P.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE DOOMED NATION.
A passion of anger and despair swept over Ireland when it was at last announced that Crowe had sold the pass. For some days the people were in the same dazed and helpless condition of mind that followed the potato blight of '46. In that terrible year one of the strange and most universally observed phenomena was that the people looked, for days after the advent of the blight that brought the certainty of hunger and death, silent and motionless and apathetic. And so it was now, when there came a blight, less quickly, but as surely, destructive of national life and hope. There was a dread presentiment that this was a blow from which the nation was not destined to recover for many a long day, and though they could not reason about it, the people had the instinctive feeling that the rule of the landlord was now fixed more tightly than ever, and that emancipation was postponed to a day beyond that of the present generation.
The landlords appreciated the situation with the same instinctive readiness and perception. At once the pause which had come in the work of eviction was broken, the plague raged immediately with a fierceness that seemed to have gained more hellish energy and more devilish cruelty from its temporary abatement. The roads were thick with troops of people rushing wildly from their homes and fleeing from their native country as from a land cursed alike by God and by man. Mat Blake, passing along from Dublin to Ballybay, was almost driven to insanity by the sights he saw at the different sections along the way.
Every station was besieged by vast crowds of the emigrants and their friends. There are few sights so touching as the sight of the parting of Irish families at a railway station. The ties of family are closer and more affectionate than anybody can appreciate who has not lived the life of an Irish home. The children grow up in a dependence on their parents that may well seem slavery to other peoples. The grown son is still the "boy" years after he has attained manhood's years, the daughter remains a little girl, whom her mother has the right to chide and direct and control in every action. Such ties beget helplessness as well as affection, and the Irish peasant still regards many things as worse than death, which, by peoples of less ardent religious faith, are regarded more philosophically.
When Mat looked at the simple faces of those poor girls, at the bewildered look in the countenances of the young men, and thought of how ignorant and helpless these people were, he could understand the almost insane anguish of their parents as they saw them embark on an ocean so dark and tempestuous and remote as the crowded cities of America, and Mat could penetrate down into the minds of his people and see with the lightning flash of sympathy the dread spectre that tortured the minds, filled the eyes, and darkened the brows of the Irish parents.
Station after station, it was always the same sight. The parting relatives were locked in each other's arms; they wept and cried aloud, and swayed in their grief.