Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
was to see the poor fellow take to the hill-side, with a handful of
misbegotten idiots behind him, dressed in a new uniform ordered for
the occasion, and carrying pikes and rusty swords, and pokers, and
such other weapons as they could conveniently command. They had not
even victuals enough to sustain them for the first twelve hours of
their march; and whenever they knocked at the door of any of Peter's
emissaries, imploring that, for the love of the saints, he would
hand them out a bowlful of potatoes, they were greeted with a formal
commination, and told that they were accursed heretics. They tried to
storm a tollhouse or two, for the purpose of abstracting money; but
they invariably found the shutters made fast, and divers fowling-pieces
levelled at them from the windows of the upper story. At last, after
being out for four or five nights in the cold mist and rain, they came
down to a house kept by a lone widow woman, in which several of the
police were stationed, and swore that, if they were not admitted, they
would burn down the premises, and massacre every man, woman, and child
within. Possibly they never intended to do anything of the kind; for
Byrne, though a blockhead, had nothing savage about him; indeed, he was
rather soft-hearted than otherwise. He ran round the house, entreating
the police to surrender, in order to save the effusion of blood;
but they merely answered by a laugh of contempt, and a discharge of
musketry, which was supposed to have settled Byrne's business. However,
his followers, on looking about, found him squatted in the widow's
cabbage-garden, marvellously distressed in heart, and apparently
labouring under a painful visitation of the bowels. He escaped for the
moment, but a few days afterwards was seized, tried, and sentenced to
transportation. And this is the last actual outbreak which has occurred
in any portion of Squire Bull's estates.
But you must not, from this, conclude that everything was going smooth.
That infernal miscreant, Peter, had acted politicly throughout the
latter affair; not from any regard to Squire Bull, but because he knew
he could make more of him by seeming to give into his authority, than
by backing up a stupid egotistical creature like Byrne, who never had
the ghost of a chance. Now, however, when the danger was over, he,
through his emissaries, thought fit to claim prodigious credit for
the disinterested part which he had acted. One Claretson was at this
time ground-steward for the Squire on that farm, and to him the whole
retainers of Peter repaired.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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