When the deputation had exhausted themselves and their subject, Mr. McKee began quietly to draw attention to the happy homes which had been desolated by whiskey, the brilliant young men whom it had ruined, the amiable neighbors whom it had hurried into drunkards’ graves, and then he pointed to the Brontës as an example of the baneful influence of the trade on the sellers of the stuff themselves.
The deputation, some of them Orangemen, were in no mood to listen to radical doctrines, subversive of their time-honored customs, and they began to threaten.
Mr. McKee, who was six feet six inches high, and of great muscular power, drew himself up to his full stature, and calling to his servant, then at breakfast in the kitchen, told him to saddle his best mare, as he wished to ride in haste to Newry, to publish his sermon in time for circulation on the following Sunday. Then, turning to the deputation, he thanked them for their early visit, which he hoped would bear fruit, and bowed them out of his parlor.
He rode the best horse in the whole district, and he never drew rein till he reached the printing-office in Newry, and he had the sermon ready for circulation on the following Sunday, and handed it to his people as they retired.
In 1798 Mr. McKee, then a youth, watched from a hill in his father’s land the battle of Ballynahinch. He had in his arms at the time a little nephew who had been left in his charge. The little nephew became the great Doctor Edgar of Belfast, who used to boast playfully that he was “up in arms” at the battle of Ballynahinch.
Mr. McKee sent a copy of The Rechabites to his eloquent nephew. Doctor Edgar read the sermon, and then, rising from his seat, proceeded swiftly to carry all the whiskey he had in the house into the street, and empty it into the gutter. With that drink offering Doctor Edgar inaugurated the great temperance reform. From Ireland he passed to Scotland, and from Scotland to England. The whole kingdom was mightily stirred, and the temperance cause has ever since continued to flourish. The little seed, stimulated at first by the Brontë public-houses, has become a great tree, the branches of which extend to all lands.
We have now seen the Brontës in the daily round of their common pursuits. In the next chapter we hope to see old Hugh in the light of his Brontë genius.
III.
THE IRISH RACONTEUR OR STORY-TELLER.
The Hakkawāti is the oriental story-teller, the man who beyond all others relieves the tedium and wearisomeness of oriental life. I have often watched the oriental Hakkawāti, seated in the centre of a large crowd, weaving stories with subtile plots and startling surprises, using pathos and passion and pungent wit, and always interspersing his narratives with familiar incidents, and laying on local color, to give an appearance of vraisemblance, or reality, to the wildest fancies.
The Arabian Hakkawāti generally tells his stories at night, when the weird and wonderful are most effective. He has always a fire so arranged as to light up his countenance with a ruddy glow, so that the movements and contortions of a mobile face may add support to the narrative. He sometimes proceeds slowly, stumbling and correcting himself, like D’Israeli, as if his one great desire was to stick to the literal truth.