It is not strange that these two peoples should be divided in religious belief, for a man’s temperament leads his beliefs, and the teachings of the two Churches fit the types of mind. The Protestant Church, offering a father’s stern love, fits the self-reliant Orange temperament; and the Catholic Church, which holds out a mother’s universal arms to the tired spirit, answers the Celtic need. The religious bigotry of this part of the world was astonishing to a stranger. It was mediæval in vigour, and it was undeniable that the Protestants were the real offenders. There was a certain reason for this state of things, inasmuch as Catholic Ireland greatly outnumbered Protestant Ireland, and the weak man is always up in arms. At those seasons when the Protestant God seemed to demand of His devotees a greater fury of worship than usual, there would come a gust of religious intolerance, which brought the Middle Ages back again. How soon will these two poles, which are the complement of each other, meet? If these two peoples would come together, and the hardy northern blood flow into the numerous gentler veins of the South, so that a new race, stiffer than the South, more imaginative and tolerant than the North, should be bred on the ancient hills, in the old dales, Ireland’s golden age, which poets have sung about so long, might return again. They told me in Dublin that the annual fury of these northern people begins to wax on the first of July, and reaches its height upon the twelfth of the month; but before the end of June the Orange drummer has taken his drum from its cover and the canes to beat it off the shelf, and on the fine evenings, after work, when the summer warmth is heating his blood, he sets himself to a preliminary drumming, his insistent summons rolls down the street, and a careless world is reminded that once upon a time a certain King William of immortal memory crossed the Boyne River to the sound of drums and fifes. The fifeman has dusted his fife and blown a preliminary roulade, and those who are not musicians have cleared their throats to cry the more vigorously “To hell with the Pope.” This year, on the eve of the twelfth, greater events were to befall than the stout Orangemen, in their black and their orange sashes, dreamed of. The murderer was to come forth, and the world was to receive him as equal. First, the South full of rumours, then, while men shook their heads in disbelief, news that peace had come. Out of the blackest clouds the dove had swooped back into sight, had alighted after endless flight and folded its wings.