SO you wish to know why Smithers resigned his position as head constable of Kilmacswiggin? Well, as the night’s young, and I’m not particularly busy, I don’t mind spending half an hour or so in telling you the story.
You see, during the time of the Land League troubles, some of the landlords round here, knowing that they had little reason to expect any overwhelming affection from their tenants, and finding their sources of income, if not castles in the air, at least rents in the clouds, for bad luck to the penny they could collect, began to get uneasy and scared, and thought it would be a wise thing to have a dozen or so more police in the parish, though it’s too many of the same streelers were quartered on us to begin with. The district, barring that the farmers kept their money in their own pockets and used strong language when the rent collector called on them, was quiet, and peaceable, and could have been easily managed without a peeler at all, but the landlords wanted bad to force their rents out of the poor peasantry or take their land from them, as they used to do in the cruel times before the League stepped in and put an extinguisher on their proceedings.
So, as the people couldn’t be tempted to make fools of themselves by playing into the land-grabbers’ hands by such frolics as popping at their agents with old blunderbusses from the back of a hedge, or setting fire to process servers’ hayricks, the landlords began to manufacture outrages on their own account. They wrote threatening letters to each other by the bushel, with skulls, and crossbones, and coffins for date lines, and blood, and blasphemy, and murder reeking in every sentence, and pikes, and guns, and pistols below the signature of “Captain Moonlight” or “Rory of the Hills,” to show how terribly in earnest they were. Oh, they constructed those epistles in the orthodox manner recognized by Mr. Trench in his “Recollections of an Irish Landlord,” and made familiar to the world by the regiments of English special correspondents that were then roaming and perambulating Ireland like journalistic ghouls or body-snatchers looking for corpses to be dissected in the columns of their respective organs. They wrote, too, blood-curdling, gruesome, harrowing narratives of the horrors of life in Kilmacswiggin for the London papers, till one of the Orange members from the North drew attention in the House to what he called the terrible state of affairs in that parish, and, though Healy and Biggar contradicted his assertions, and laughed at his lugubrious forebodings of massacre, rapine, blood, and flame if a whole corps d’armee and a part of the channel squadron wasn’t immediately sent to occupy the bogs and ditches there, the then chief secretary, Buckshot Forster, promised to see into the matter, and he wrote to the head inspector in Dublin, Col. Hillier, and Hillier sent a letter down to Smithers that made that head constable’s ears tingle. He as much as told Smithers that if he didn’t arrest somebody for something or other he might take out his walking papers. Of course Smithers was in a quandary. He’d willingly have arrested the whole parish, man, woman, and child, if he could have found the shadow of an excuse, but he couldn’t, poor fellow.
Just at this time it happened that Pat Moran, at the far end of the parish, was engaged in a little business speculation on his own account, in the shape of a brisk trade in the finest poteen that was ever distilled in these parts—and that’s a big word. The still was away somewhere in the mountains,—it may be there yet, so I shan’t go into geographical details,—and Pat was employed as a kind of messenger between the boys there and some of the hotel keepers and grocers in the towns and villages round who don’t believe in contributing any more to the British revenue than they can help. Maybe he visited me sometimes, and maybe he didn’t. That’s neither here nor there. I may just observe that I never pay taxes willingly. You can take what you like out of that.
Some of Pat’s neighbors grew envious of the good luck he was having, and one day some sleeveen—it was never found out who the stag was—came into the barracks and told Head Constable Smithers that Pat Moran had guns and powder and shot hid away in his old cabin. The sly rogue knew that if he complained to Smithers that it was merely illicit whiskey Pat had, the head constable wouldn’t give a thraneen about the matter, and as like as not would let Pat alone. But the mention of contraband material of war worked up Smithers like a touch of electricity. Why, if he could manage to seize a few rifles and a cartridge or two of dynamite, his fortune was made, his position assured. There was no position he might not attain. He would succeed Clifford Lloyd. He might be made a K. C. B. Dim visions of a peerage even floated through his brain.
In five minutes he was en route for Pat’s, with a dozen constabulary men at his back. How Pat found out he was coming I can’t say; but he did find out while Smithers was still half a mile away. Pat had a hurried consultation with his mother. He had no time to shift a keg of poteen which was in the house, but they hit upon a ruse which might succeed, and at any rate couldn’t make things worse. They wheeled the keg of whiskey under the bed in the back room, and in another minute Pat was lying on the bed with his head enveloped in a Tara hill of bandages, awaiting the crisis.
The crisis came. So did the police. In fact, they came together. The search began. The peelers explored the teapot and kettle for rifles, and seemed disappointed when they found no artillery in the skillet. They sounded the hearthstone, analyzed the cradle, held a sort of post-mortem examination on the furniture, and poked the roof so effectually with their bayonets that it resembled the lid of a pepper-box. The commander went so far as to make the youngest of the force ascend the chimney. He found nothing there but soot. However, he brought enough of that back with him to satisfy his most ardent desires.
Then Smithers prepared to enter the back room, but the old woman clung to his arm and tearfully beseeched him not to do so.
“Ha! ha!” cried the enterprising officer, bursting the door in with his foot, “I smell a rat,” and he rushed into the room, where the first object to meet his gaze was a head raised languidly from the pillow, and poulticed and bandaged to the size of a champion squash or watermelon.
“Oh, wirra! wirra!” sobbed the old woman; “you’ve kilt my boy. He’s very bad with small-pox, ochone! ochone! and the doctor said only this blissid mornin’ that he wasn’t to be wuck at all, at all. It only bruck on him last night, an’ it’s a beautiful pock you have, avick machree; and now—”
But that head constable had leaped ten feet backward clean out of the house, and was licking all previous racing records up the boreen, with his handkerchief to his nose, and his followers tearing after him like a pack of hungry fox-hounds. Talk of Myers, the great Yankee runner! He would have been left in the cold that day.
You may be sure it wasn’t long before the whole story of how Moran fooled the head constable went the rounds of the country. It came to Smithers’ own ears at last, and from that hour he was an altered man. He would retire into the woods to vent his feelings, and people who heard him sometimes say that his oaths would lift the hair on the scalp of an Egyptian mummy. The more he brooded, the more he cursed. There never was a curse, English, Irish, or American, that he didn’t get hold of, and he invented such a lot of brand-new, original, comic, pathetic, eccentric, square, round, oblong, elliptical, severely plain, and highly ornamented or convoluted profane pyrotechnics that a perfume of sulphur and brimstone seemed to hang around his conversation. The habit so crept upon him that when he wished at last to shake it off, he couldn’t. His tongue had grown so accustomed to decorative blasphemy that it could utter nothing else. It became a matter of anxious consideration to him how he was to eliminate from his conversation the picturesque adjectives it would under ordinary circumstances have taken him thirty years to accumulate. He consulted a friendly sub. “Smith,” said he, “I have a [powerful expletive not to be found in any polite guide to conversation] bad habit.”
“Only one,” said his brother official; “that’s nothing. A man who has been on the force ten years and has only acquired one bad habit, has wasted his opportunities.”
“Well, but this is one that is likely to get me into a blank blank [double-barrelled adjective] muss in society some fine day. You see I can’t speak ten words without cursing. If I can, —— my eyes!” [ophthalmic operation not recognized in modern surgery].
“Ah,” said Harvey Duff 2; “you must repress that custom. It’s low.”
“How the —— [distant region occasionally alluded to in sermons and theological disquisitions] can I?”
His colleague cogitated. When a policeman cogitates, there are enough scintillations of intellect flashing round to illuminate the interior of an Egyptian pyramid. The result of his meditation was his advice to Smithers to take a pocket-book, and every time he transgressed to take a note of the offence. In twelve hours he had filled up two three-hundred-page memorandum books, and used up a dozen and a half of pencils. It became irksome pottering round with a note-book in one hand and a stick of lead in the other entering everlasting ejaculations; he wore the skin off his fingers, and, besides, he couldn’t keep up with himself, and he missed cataloguing a few score emphatic expressions every five minutes. He adopted another plan. He arranged with his wife that every time he articulated forbidden sounds he should hand her over a penny. He provided himself with £5 in coppers the first day of the arrangement, but he hadn’t a red cent by noon, and in three days he had parted with all his ready cash, made over his next year’s income, and didn’t even own the boots he stood in. Then he agreed with his better half that she should pluck a hair out of his head every time he offended, and now if there’s a more bald-headed man to be found on this side the day of judgment, I’m willing to turn cannibal, and eat him.
His habit attracted the attention of his superiors at last, when his report began to resemble his verbal utterances, and they reprimanded him sharply. He replied in a letter that is preserved in the official archives as a sample of what the English language is capable of. The reading of it drove two Castle authorities mad, and sent the third into a galloping consumption. Well, that’s how Smithers left the force. Strange story, ain’t it?
FOR enterprise, facility of invention and expedient, and the ability to “get there” in spite of every difficulty and obstacle, the American newspaper man is a century ahead of his European brother; but I know of one Irish knight of the stylograph who could give even a Yankee points, if we are to believe his friends.
Brian has been known to take notes in a rain-storm with a sharp-pointed scissors on the ribs of his umbrella.
When his leg was broken in a boiler explosion, he chronicled the event on the bandages.
When he had to disguise himself as a bandsman at an Orange demonstration, he took down the chairman’s speech in the mouth of his trombone.
He sent a graphic account of an Arctic expedition engraven on blocks of ice from Smith’s Sound, and he once pencilled the story of a railway collision on the wooden leg of a survivor. He forgot to mention how the mangled victim was accommodated with an artificial limb so soon after the disaster, but he never bothers his head about such minor details.
But his greatest phonographic achievement was in Central Africa a few years ago. King Mtesa, the dusky potentate discovered by Stanley, picked up from his European guests, among other accomplishments, the art of making speeches. It was a new, a delicious recreation to the savage soul. Twice a month he assembled his warriors, and held forth, and the ebon Secretary of State who failed to ejaculate the Central African substitute for “hear, hear,” at the proper moment, was served up for luncheon on the conclusion of the speech.
Brian heard of this. It became the one burning ambition of his soul to take a shorthand note of the Boston-baked-beans-color orator. He set out for Tanganyika to carry out his project. Accompanied by a dozen sons of night he penetrated the African jungle, swam its turgid rivers, evaded its hungry tribes, escaped its fierce animals, and after weeks of adventure and suffering, with his faithful followers, reached the king’s kraal the evening before one of that monarch’s speeches.
He had been scalped, had all his teeth drawn, lost a few toes, been once half boiled, and on another occasion baked nearly to a sweet and toothsome brown; still he had survived.
But, alas! he had lost his pencil and note-book, and these indispensable adjuncts of caligraphic civilization were unknown in Mtesa’s territory since Stanley had left.
Our reporter, however, had an inventive intellect not to be thwarted by such trifling obstacles. He hunted up a chalk ridge, and when the Cicero in jet addressed his subjects, Brian planted his Zanzibari attendants on their hands and knees, and took the speech in chalk upon their naked backs.
Mtesa, in return for the promise of a copy of the paper containing the speech, furnished the stenographer and his animated note-books with an escort to the coast, and triumph would have crowned Brian’s effort but for the most striking passages of the oration being lost through one of the blacks sitting down on a wet bank before he had been transcribed!
HE was a Boston teacher, and of course had an intellect superior to the cut-and-dry theories of instruction that were followed by the common herd of schoolmasters. He believed in object-lessons; in illustrations that should catch the young idea on the fly, as it were. Thus, when he wanted to fix in the memories of the youthful scholars the titles of the principal reigning monarchs and rulers of Europe, he didn’t keep them for half an hour each day iterating monotonously, “the Queen of England,” “the President of France,” “the King of Italy,” “the Emperor of Germany,” “the Sultan of Turkey,” and “the Czar of Russia.” Not he. He elevated his pupils to a higher sense, a more individual appreciation, of the majesties of the Continent. He told Mike, the saloon keeper’s son, to know himself in future as the French President; Franz Schweibiere became Emperor of Germany; he bestowed royal honors on all his most promising pupils, and he felt proudly conscious that he had planted firmly in their minds, as part of their own identity, the knowledge of the sovereigns who are the arbiters of the Old World’s destiny. We draw a veil over his emotions when on a recent unhappy morning the King of Italy held up a greasy hand and piped out, “Please, sir, de Sultan of Turkey won’t be here to-day. De Emperor of Russia hit him a smash in de eye last night, and blinded him!”
IN no country in either the civilized or the barbaric world can we find the counter-type of the Irish Orangeman. In France, Frenchmen are Frenchmen, whatever may be their religious faith. The Catholic from Bavaria fought side by side with the Prussian Lutheran, when German independence was assailed. When the White Czar summons his legions to the defence of the Russian Empire, the peasant who follows the tenets of the Greek Church takes his place under the eagle standard alongside the persecuted believer in the faith of Rome. The English Catholics are as steadfast in their support of the “meteor flag of Old England” as any of the believers in the motley creeds of that much-religious nation—Methodists, Calvinists, Wesleyans, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Baptists, Episcopalians, or Jumpers. In Ireland alone in this tolerant nineteenth century do we find religious bigotry so ineradical, so irrepressible, so stupid as to be beyond the reach of persuasion and the voice of reason. A condemnation of Orangeism is unnecessary, but a description of one of its votaries may be interesting. Nobody falls in love with a two-headed chimpanzee or a double-tailed baboon, but they are valuable accessories to a dime museum. By and by the Orangeman will find his natural place in a side-show, but in the mean time, for the benefit of future Barnums and Forepaughs, we will sketch the prominent features, personal and historical, of one of the tribe.
Billy Macshiver was born in one of those out-of-the-way villages in Antrim, into which neither intelligence nor common sense has so far penetrated. His father was the hero of many a fierce sectarian strife, as the countless bruises he bore upon his venerable scalp could well testify. From his earliest infancy Billy was taught hatred of everything connected with Catholicity. He was told that the cross was a symbol of superstition, a Catholic church the temple of Lucifer, a Catholic priest a stray fiend who had escaped from Limbo, and the “Papists” generally a lot of poor, benighted idiots, especially created by a benign Providence to afford skulls for himself and his confreres to crack. He learned that England was the most Protestant nation in the world, and consequently the greatest; that the “Boyne Water” was the grandest musical composition of this or any other age; and that the Rev. R. R. Kane, a notorious Orange firebrand, was a second St. Paul. He had been taught to shun everything green as he would the small-pox—there was only one color for a devout Christian to patronize—orange. God had not decorated the trees and fields with orange, because he had reserved that beautiful tint for a chosen few, and didn’t wish it to be too common. Of course, when Billy reached the years of maturity he joined the clan in whose ranks his father’s head had so often been bandaged. He became an Orangeman of the deepest purple dye. He mounted Orange lilies, natural and artificial, resplendent and faded, in the button-hole nearest his heart, on every available opportunity. He learned to play “Croppers, lie down” on the concertina, and to master the mysteries of the jew’s-harp to the stirring anthem of “Protestant Boys.” He led insane processions on every 12th of July, and won endless glory by “knocking out” an old woman who declined to shout “To h—with the Pope” at his modest request.
He is now grand master of an Orange lodge. He is a skilful rhetorician, of course. I quote his last 12th of July speech, to show the stuff that awakens the enthusiasm of his class:—
“Brethren—We have met once more to commemorate to-night the memory of the great, the glorious, the pious, and the—the—the Orange-headed William, and in rising to propose the toast of his immortal memory, I—I—as a matter of fact I—I—get upon my feet. (Cheers.) At no time in the history of Orangeism did there exist a greater necessity to—to—to, in short—drink his memory—that is to say, to drink—to drink—to—oh, you know what I mean. (Tumultuous applause.) The papishes are abroad like roaring lions seeking whom they may devour. Shall they swallow us? (Loud cries of ‘No.’) Our Church has been disestablished, and Mr. Gladstone has kissed the Pope’s toe. (Shame.) Yes, shame; but are there not thousands of Orangemen prepared to wipe out with their toes—their big toes—upon the most fleshy part of Gladstone’s carcass this—this—this insult to Christianity? (Loud applause.) They have put down, to a certain extent, our gay and festive and hilarious gatherings, which used to strike terror to the souls—of—of—well, they struck terror all round to somebody or other. (Hear, hear.) The tyrants won’t allow us to remove the idols from Israel by wrecking any more nunneries. The despots forbid us to let the light of the gospel into Papists’ heads with bludgeons any longer. (Groans.) The love of God has departed from the English Cabinet, and their brutal mercenaries forbid believers in the Word to damn the Pope for less than forty shillings. (Hisses.) But still, my brethren, we can drink the pious memory of the sainted William for threepence-halfpenny a glass (loud cheers), and whilst we bear the name of men shall a threepenny bit stand between us and our noble duty? (Shouts of Never and No surrender.) Gentlemen, fill your glasses with whiskey and Boyne water. Here’s to the glorious memory of the glorious William; here’s to the glorious constitution he gave us; here’s to the glorious Boyne water, and, I may add, the glorious whiskey with which to-night it is allied; here’s to the glorious Queen of England, the glorious mother of a glorious baker’s dozen; here’s to glorious John Brown, the pillar of the state and the true prototype of Martin Luther; to thunder with the Pope, and hell’s bells, artillery, bombshells, prison cells, death knells, and a variegated assortment of diversified yells ring, swing, cling, and ding forever and ever amen in the ears of Davitt and Parnell.” (Frantic applause and several free fights.)