WE learn from a special despatch which has been cabled via Shanghai and Yokohama to Britain’s representatives abroad that the demon of anarchy has again broke loose in Ireland, that the flood-gates of sedition have been once more thrown open, and the pestilential torrents of a whole lot of things are deluging society. We feel that a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary and a very fair acquaintanceship with the slang of nearly thirty States are utterly inadequate to express our tumultuous thoughts on reading the following touching epistle from Cornet Gadfly, who is at present attached to the suite of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland:—
There is some dark plot afoot here to destroy the peace of mind and happiness of her Majesty’s defenders.
I was wending my cheerful way last evening toward my temporary lodgings in the bosom of that highly interesting family, the Higginses, who never did anything so low or ignoble as to work for their country, and are, consequently, enjoying the reward of their virtue, in the shape of a big pension from a grateful government. I was whistling contentedly the refrain of England’s “Marseillaise,” “We don’t want to fight, but by jingo when we do!”
On turning the corner of Rutland Square, my legs evinced a sudden and unexpected interest in the atmospheric and astronomic condition of the heavens, for I found myself progressing homeward at the rate of twenty miles an hour on the back of my head, with one foot pointing triumphantly to Saturn, and the other indicating the whereabouts of the Milky Way.
Having satisfied myself that my bodily inversion was not the result of an earthquake, I wound myself up at the Rotunda railings, ejected a few front teeth and some powerful ejaculations, and surveyed the position.
I had come to grief on a slide some eighteen inches wide and about forty feet in length. The mutinous, seditious, rebellious, and barbarous juvenile population of that ward must have been nearly a week improving that slide, until it was so slippery that a bucket of pitch couldn’t have stuck on it, and a coating of Dublin mud as adhesive as a dish of Boston baked beans, attached to my boot soles, afforded no protection to either person or property. The whole fiendish arrangement must have been organized with devilish ingenuity by either a Fenian engineer or a National League architect. Rage, anguish, revenge, agony, surged through my bosom as I contemplated the icy snare.
But it is strange how the misfortunes of others reconcile us to our own. In this instance, balm was poured upon the troubled waters of my soul and my head was metaphorically bandaged and plastered as I saw approaching the fatal spot, Ensign Wilson of the Lancers, and the fair Araminta Higgins.
They were mashing.
He, in all the pristine glory of a new tunic and a re-dyed sash, preserved the best traditions of the British uniform by the ardor of his suit. He was passionate, eloquent, effusive; she was bashful, simpering, and lackadaisical, as became a pensioned Higgins.
“Araminta,” he murmured softly, “believe no base calumnies. I am as true to thee as—as—as thy father to his pension or the needle to the pole. I am thine—thine only. No power on earth can sever us.”
At this moment he shot off suddenly, leaving his hat at the lady’s feet and slinging his umbrella out into the roadway. A few minutes afterward a dejected and dilapidated British officer was indulging in profane observations of a remarkably ornamental and original description as he supported himself against a friendly lamp-post, while the dormant Irish blood in the fickle Araminta asserted itself through the medium of a coarse laugh.
They vanished in the darkness, but I do not think the enamored ensign spooned any more that night. Barely had they disappeared, when two prominent members of the Constitutional Club crossed the street from the direction of the house of a certain eminent judge. They were energetically discussing the National League campaign in Ulster. They neared the precipice—I mean the slide.
“This Parnellite invasion will fail—utterly fail—if we remain firm,” said the taller of the two, Col. K—H—. “Unity and perseverance must be our watchwords. United we stand—”
He did not finish the sentence, for they became divided, and his head rang out a hollow note of defiance to the breeze. However, despite his desire for unity, the Tory victim did not remain long rooted to the soil, but made tracks for the nearest saloon to recuperate his exhausted energies.
The next visitor to the insurrectionary skating-rink was a well-known attorney, who is at the present moment engaged in an abortive effort to discover an Irish constituency that will have him at any price. Mr. N. looked an attorney in every inch. You could read six-and-eight pence in every wrinkle of his rugged countenance; his protruding coat-tails were veritable embodiments of fieri-facias; his stiff, angular collar had the disagreeable similitude of a bill of costs, and the leather bag he carried in his hand was a positive arsenal of writs and decrees and processes. I felt horror-stricken as I saw this legal luminary stepping briskly to destruction.
Just as he reached one end of the glassy line a little milliner with a bandbox and a brown-paper parcel stepped upon the other.
They had never met before, but the instant their feet touched that atrocious slide they darted together with the enthusiasm of old lovers.
Then there was a collision, and a confused combination of legal documents and straw bonnet, proceedings in bankruptcy and colored ribbons, opinions of counsel and hairpins; and when the law adviser got home he found in his bag an artificial bang where he had been looking for the draft of a will, and that poor little milliner’s duck of a bonnet had vanished out of her ruined bandbox, while its place was filled with a horrible notice to claimants and incumbrancers.
When the law and the lady had gone from my gaze the pantomime was continued by new artists. A poor-law guardian, who had voted against the North Dublin Union adopting the laborers’ act, was explaining his reasons therefor, and appealed to his auditor thus: “You would have done the same yourself in my position. Put yourself in my place.”
And away he went, express speed, on his hands and knees, till he was brought to a stop by his head thundering on a policeman’s belt. Then the policeman sat on top of him, and a postman threw a double somersault over the pair, and the band of the Coldstream Guards marching smartly round the corner got mixed up with them, and it wasn’t till the policeman had half swallowed the trombone, and the poor-law guardian had got the double bass round his neck for a collar, and the postman had been engulfed in the big drum that order was restored, and constitutional peace triumphed once more over revolutionary chaos.
But I ask the civilized and great British Empire, how much longer are we going to tolerate a state of society which permits slides and pitfalls and chasms to be laid for loyal feet, and bruised heads, smashed ribs, and pulverized hip bones to bring woe and desolation to loyal homes? It’s awful!
MR. PHINEAS PHLYNN, J. P., was a few years ago the agent upon the Irish estates of that erratic and eccentric, but excitable and energetic nobleman, Lord Oglemore. If Mr. Phlynn no longer performs the onerous functions of that office, it is because he has taken to a far-off and less humid sphere his various and variegated vices, and has probably by his importation into a remarkably torrid zone added another to the abundant torments of Pandemonium. In 1879, however, Mr. Phlynn, much to his own satisfaction, but a great deal more to the misery of his neighbors, was still in the flesh. Mr. Phlynn was by no means a happy man. His commission for collecting the rents of his absentee master was only a paltry shilling in the pound, and as Lord Oglemore’s landed property amounted to but a few thousand acres, and Mr. Phlynn’s habits included an addiction to French wines and Irish whiskey, a decided inclination to woo Dame Fortune by speculations on the turf and ventures at the roulette table, and an amorous disposition which plunged him into frequent financial scrapes, he felt that he must wring a bigger percentage out of his employer and increase his emoluments.
But how was it to be done?
He couldn’t raise the rents. They were so high already that the tenantry had some difficulty in reaching them, and were beginning to indulge in mutinous murmurs about abatements and reductions and re-adjustments, and the other pestilential, communistic, and diabolical ideas of the Land League. Phineas had been complaining for months to his noble master about the danger and difficulties of his post, surrounded, as he described himself, by hosts of murderous assassins who thirsted for his gore and wanted to perforate his magisterial hide with surreptitious bullets; and Phineas had strongly hinted that his accumulated risks deserved a commensurate reward in the shape of an additional income. But the only consolation Lord Oglemore vouchsafed was an assurance to Mr. Phlynn that if those “demmed Irish rascals” should make his carcass a repository for any appreciable quantity of lead, the beggars should have their rents raised fifty per cent. all around. This didn’t console Phineas worth a cent, for he felt that if he were laid to rest with his fathers with a few pounds of scrap iron in his manly bosom, he couldn’t enjoy the extra commission on the fifty per cent. rise in any exuberant degree. Besides, the levity of his lordship’s remarks induced the agent to guess that that rather wide-awake peer doubted his dismal forebodings. So Phineas resolved that he would bring matters to a crisis. There should be an outrage—a sanguinary, blood-curdling outrage, that would prove to the unbelieving Oglemore that his agent carried his life in his hand, and was certainly entitled to at least eighteen pence in each pound of the revenue he gathered in perpetual peril.
There was an outrage. As none of the tenantry had the most remote notion of shooting Mr. Phlynn, Mr. Phlynn shot himself—at least, he shot his own hat. There were many obvious advantages in Phineas taking this horrible task upon himself. Of course, the chief of these was the fact that if any desperate tenant had sought to make a target of Mr. Phlynn’s hat, he wouldn’t have paused to ascertain whether Mr. Phlynn’s head was in it or not—really, he might have preferred that the hat should be so tenanted. A circumstance of that sort would have been decidedly inconvenient. With Mr. Phlynn as the assailant of his own hat, no such objectionable mistake was possible. Mr. Phlynn carefully placed the hat on the roadside between his own residence and the nearest police barrack, and fired at it twice. One ball ripped the front rim off and the other tore a hole in the crown. Then carefully replacing his dilapidated head-gear upon his undisturbed cranium, he flung his revolver into the adjacent ditch and rushed breathless into the presence of the sub-inspector in the police barrack aforementioned, and poured into the astonished ears of that horrified luminary a ghastly story of his terrible encounter with a band of four masked miscreants, who had fired at least a dozen times at him, two balls actually grazing his head, in proof of which, behold the battered hat!
The excitement in connection with the matter was intense. The country was scoured for miles around, and thirty or forty arrests made. The revolver, of course, was found, and strengthened Phlynn’s terrible tale. The London papers teemed with denunciations of the weakness of the government which permitted such a state of affairs in a civilized community. Illustrations of the historic hat graced the pictorial pages of English journals. A reward of £500 was offered for any information that would lead to the conviction of anybody. Lord Oglemore made such an exciting speech on the matter in the House of Peers that he positively kept those hereditary legislators awake for twenty minutes—a feat unparalleled in the history of that chamber. There was not so much stir and fuss in that assembly since the day it was rumored that John Brown had been offered a peerage under the title of Earl of Glenlivet. For nearly half of the twenty minutes that the noble senators kept awake it was soul-stirring. Then they fell asleep again, overpowered by their emotions.
All except Lord Oglemore. He was so elated by the temporary prominence given to him as the employer of an Irish agent who had been fired at, that he resolved to perpetuate his celebrity. Why, if he could manage to get some of his tenants hanged or transported for the affair, he would become quite a lion in London society. With this laudable ambition permeating his soul, he drove, immediately after he had concluded his outburst of enthralling eloquence, to the headquarters of the London detective force in Scotland Yard, and, by munificent promises in the event of success, secured the services of that eminent thief-catcher, Inspector Spriggins, to unravel the mystery. The following day, Spriggins, got up as an English horse dealer seeking for Irish equine bargains, left London for Leitrim.
In the mean time the Irish government, who did not feel satisfied with the conduct of the local constabulary, had deputed Sergeant Crawley of the G division, Dublin metropolitan force, to proceed to the same neighborhood, to search for the destroyers of Phineas Phlynn’s hat.
In the last week in October, Spriggins got on the scent. From all he could hear, see, and judge, he concluded that the outrage was the work of strangers. He had already spotted a suspicious stranger.
About the same time Sergeant Crawley struck the trail. It was evident that the deed had been committed by some one from a distance, because every man, woman, and child within a radius of twenty miles had been arrested, and established their innocence. The foreigner who had failed would be likely to renew the attempt. Were there any non-residents loafing around? Yes! Crawley had fixed his man.
It was certainly peculiar that, while Spriggins was firmly convinced that Crawley had made ribbons of Phlynn’s hat, Crawley was taking measures to arrest Spriggins for attempted murder, and Sub-Inspector Blake of the local police had written to Dublin for a warrant to arrest both Spriggins and Crawley, who were passing under the respective names of Jones and Brennan.
Spriggins, on the first day of November, called upon Phlynn.
“Mr. Phlynn,” said he, “I have got the leader of the gang who fired at you.”
“The devil you have,” said Phlynn. You see Phlynn had very strong reasons for doubting the accuracy of the information.
“Yes,” replied Spriggins; “I have him, no mistake.”
“Where is he?” queried Phineas.
“Here.”
“What!” shouted the agent, as agonizing visions of penal servitude for revolver practice on his own hat made his heart jump. “Who, what, where, when, why, how—”
“Oh,” responded Scotland Yard, “I forgot. Let me introduce myself. I am Inspector Spriggins, of the London detective police. I have been commissioned by Lord Oglemore to fish up this business. I’ve fished. I may say I have landed my salmon. I just want you to fill me up a warrant for the arrest of James Brennan, 5 feet 10 inches, brown hair and whiskers, hazel eyes, a wart on his nose, no particular occupation, and at present sojourning at the Railway Hotel, Mohill. I’ll get the police there to give a hand. No excuses, please. I’ve hooked my trout, I’ve trapped my rabbit, I’ve bagged my fox, I’ve snared my hare—I have him, I tell you. Fill up the warrant.”
Mr. Phineas Phlynn filled up the warrant, and the sagacious Spriggins departed on his mission of legal retribution on the body of the unconscious Crawley.
“Send down three men from the G division in plain clothes with a warrant for the arrest of John Jones, for the attempted murder of Phineas Phlynn, Lord Oglemore’s agent, on the 3d of October, 1879. Lose no time.” This was the purport of a telegraphic dispatch from Sergeant Crawley to Thomas Henry Burke, Under Secretary for Ireland, in accordance with which three big “G’s” made their first appearance in Mohill on the memorable 1st of November.
Sub-Inspector Blake told off ten men for special duty on Nov. 1, and about noon arrived with them on three outside cars in the little town of Mohill. “Now, boys,” was his parting advice, “this fellow Jones is a tough-looking customer, and will probably show fight. Brennan’s a rowdy, too. When I whistle, rush in and baton both of ’em if they show fight. If any of the hangers-on in the hotel seem ugly, give them the bayonet.”
“Two men with myself will be enough,” finally remarked Spriggins to Head Constable Walsh, of Mohill. “Our bird’s in the commercial room of the Railway Hotel just now. Perhaps ’twould be better, to avoid suspicion, if your men didn’t come in uniform, and they might wait outside till I whistled for them.”
It was so arranged.
Sergeant Crawley sat in the commercial room of the little hotel, describing the personal peculiarities of the fore-doomed Jones to three official Goliaths who had joined him from Dublin, when the door opened and the redoubtable Jones entered himself. Seeing his prey in deep consultation with three sturdy farmers, Jones muttered softly to himself, “By Jingo, I’ve got the whole crowd!” and instantly sounding the signal, sprang upon Crawley with a drawn pistol in his right hand and the warrant fluttering in his left.
“Holy Moses!” gasped Crawley; “they mean to murder us too,” and he ducked under the table, where Spriggins let go three or four shots at him, while two G men rushed at Spriggins and two local constables grappled with the two G men, and the remaining Dublin detective began a racket on his own account by firing round promiscuously, taking a chip off Spriggins’ ear, slicing a cutlet off Crawley’s cheek, and depositing one of the Mohill men on the half-shell, as it were, by a shot in the abdomen. At this moment Sub-Inspector Blake, his soul afire with war’s dread echoes, leaped into the apartment just in time to receive on his sconce the full weight of a brass spittoon fired by Sergeant Crawley, who, from his intrenchment under the table, was carrying on a destructive artillery bombardment of similar bombshells and grenades. Of course Blake sounded the alarm, and his followers charged with fixed bayonets into the room. They skivered Spriggins, they splintered Crawley, they committed multifarious ravages upon the sacred skins of the Dublin detectives, and in the joyous exhilaration of the hour they skewered each other up against the wainscoating, and pinned each other against the table, and prodded each other through the arms and legs of chairs and couches, and shed each other’s blood for their Queen and Constitution in the most liberal and disinterested manner. Finally, when there wasn’t a square three-inch patch of whole skin among the combined forces, the chambermaids and waiters came in and took the entire lot prisoners. Then followed mutual explanations, a reciprocal production of warrants, general expressions of regret, and a mournfully unanimous feeling that amongst the dark, unsolved problems of agrarian crimes would ever remain the awful mystery of who shot Phineas Phlynn’s hat.