Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)Hurlbert, William Henry
History
Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American (1 of 2): (2nd ed.) (1888)
Hurlbert, William Henry
Ireland -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Politics and government -- 1837-1901
EDENVALE, _Sunday, Feb. 19._--I was awakened at dawn by the clamour of
countless wild ducks, to a day of sunshine as brilliant and almost as
warm as one sees at this season in the south of France. Mrs. Stacpoole
speaks of this place with a kind of passion, and I can quite understand
it. Clearly this, again, is not a case of the absentee landlord draining
the lifeblood of the land to lavish it upon an alien soil! The demesne
is a sylvan sanctuary for the wild creatures of the air and the wood,
and they congregate here almost as they did at Walton Hall in the days
of that most delightful of naturalists and travellers, whose adventurous
gallop on the back of a cayman was the delight of all English-reading
children forty years ago, or as they do now at Gosford. Yet the crack of
the gun, forbidden in the precincts of Walton Hall, is here by no means
unknown--the whole family being noted as dead shots. I asked Mr.
Stacpoole this morning whether the park had been invaded by trespassers
since the local Nationalists declared war upon him. He said that his
only experience of anything like an attack befell not very long ago,
when his people came to the house on a Sunday afternoon and told him
that a crowd of men from Ennis, with dogs, were coming towards the park
with a loudly proclaimed intent to enter it, and go hunting upon the
property.
Upon this Mr. Stacpoole left the house with his brother and another
person, and walked down to the park entrance. Presently the men of Ennis
made their appearance on the highway. A very brief parley followed. The
men of Ennis announced their intention of marching across the park, and
occupying it.
"I think not," the proprietor responded quietly. "I think you will go
back the way you came. For you may be sure of one thing: the first man
who crosses that park wall, or enters that gate, is a dead man."
There was no show of weapons, but the revolvers were there, and this the
men of Ennis knew. They also knew that it rested with themselves to
create the right and the occasion to use the revolvers, and that if the
revolvers were used they would be used to some purpose. To their credit,
be it said, as men of sense, they suddenly experienced an almost
Caledonian respect for the "Sabbath-day," and after expressing their
discontent with Mr. Stacpoole's inhospitable reception, turned about and
went back whence they had come.
This morning an orderly from Ennis brought out news of the arrest
yesterday, at the Clare Road, of Mr. Lloyd, a Labour delegate from
London, on his return from an agitation meeting at Kildysart. Harding,
the Englishman I saw awaiting his trial yesterday, became bail for
Lloyd.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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