T HERE is an old house that has stood for close
on two hundred years by the Southern sea, looking west, by Cape Clear, towards America. It and its forerunner—there is scarcely a house in Ireland that did not, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, supplant an earlier rival—have between them seen eight generations of the same family come, and stay, and go, decently, and in a neighbourly and respectable manner ; Protestants without heat, Loyalists without rancour. 1798, and its Rebellion, passed in far-away storm that hardly, in those days of pack-horse posts, ruffled those Western waters. 1866, and the Fenians, came a little nearer. In the old house certain unusual precautions were taken ; bars were put on some of the window shutters and the hall-door was more consistently locked o' nights. But the rebels of that district in those days rose, and fell, and left no sign. There would seem to have been but little class animosity. The chief of them, a man whose name is not quite unknown to history, was one who had, before his sudden rise to notoriety, known that help and friendship might be sought and found among those whom Ireland was only then beginning to rate as foes. He had even composed a poem of congratulation on the safe return of a son of this old house from the Crimea, which, if doubtful in rhyme and peculiar in rhythm, was unimpeachable in sentiment ; a fact that may be gathered from the following lines, all, unhappily, that the writer can recall of it :-
"And see his dear sister,
Her arms round him thrown, 10 Thomas ! Dear Thomas!
Welcome back to your Home!'" Therefore did this house—like many another—and its occupants gaze on successive political tempests, unshaken, secure in friendship and the goodwill of " the neighbours."
There followed quiet years of peace and comparative plenty, and then the Famine of 1882 struck at peace, and hasty, not to say opportunist, legislation began the task of turning Ireland into two camps. Yet still this house stood firm. Its women fed the hungry, its men worked for them. Ten or fifteen years later came another time of leanness, and those who had in 1882 been the children of the old house now followed in its traditions and gave themselves . unreservedly to the work of helping their neighbours 'in .distress. And this time also passed, and left the old friendship cemented, as it Seemed, more firmly than ever.
Not long ago a man was inquired of as to the success, in his district of South-West Ireland, of recruiting for the British Army during the present war. " All the landlords is fighting, and all the labourers is enlisted," he replied; "but sure none of the decent, respectable people is gone at all ! " A similar inquiry as to Sinn Fein might almost similarly be answered, only for " landlords" should be substituted the windy youth of the towns, and the word " fighting " implies an adversary, an ingredient that has hitherto been withheld by the. English Government, and is (like onions) only theoretically indispensable in Irish stew.
But that weapons are indispensable to the effective staging of a People in Arms cannot be denied. Successive Governments have taught the People the trick of Substitution of Ownership. " The landlords " were away, fighting what is popularly known as " England's battle," and a beautiful simplicity in the affair of arming the " Soldiers of the Irish Republic " was the result. The preparations for the Hero-Task--(vide the Teutonic godfathers of the movement)—have been found unexacting. Some burnt-cork, a shot-gun, and a spy ; the last to indicate the moment when the house to be " raided " is occupied only by the maid-servants, who may be trusted to keep their heads under the bedclothes. In the district that has been spoken of, a considerable number of shot-guns and rook-rifles were thus collected ; but the owners of the old house by the sea took the matter lightly. The sons of the family were where the sons of all such families may now be found ; its women had no fear of their neighbours. The converse, however, did not apply. The neighbours postponed their visit until chance had tem-. porarily removed Intim the house those women that might prove dangerous. They then, at the unconventional hour of -3 a.m., presented themselves at the old house, and, still with friendly unconventionality, entered it by a window.
It is Ireland's singular fate to be seated on that narrow barrier that divides the sublime from the ridiculous, the tragic from the absurd, and here the tragedy, inherent in Irish Rebellion, comes in. There were no guns in the house.
With what appears to have been an excessively impressionable candle, and a pre-war expenditure of matches, the baffled heroes searehed room after room in vain. But it happened that the sol- diering and sailoring sons of the house had cultivated and indulged a taste for warlike curios. Some South Pacific native wooden spears, strangely carved, adorned one wall ; lacquered implements of Chinese ceremonial, seven feet long; headed with tridents, crescents, and horrific dragons, made terrible another. There was also a cabinet of century-old Japanese armour. If " those injaynious haythen, the Chinese "—so have they been described in an Irish pulpit—could use these as lethal weapons, Ireland should not yield to China in ingenuity. The wooden spears were spared, but the ceremonial weapons were removed from the wall, and are now, presumably, in the Sinn Fein armoury. (In what clash of arms, one wonders, will a British General be found impaled on that trident, or mangled in the jaws of those dragons ?) From the Japanese cabinet a dagger and a helmet were requisitioned. The latter bore, not inappropriately, as a crest an embattled rabbit.
Whether the results of this Raid are tragic, or absurd, may be left to the " injaynious " reader to decide.
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