‘No, I don’t think they do; at least so far as I have seen. They speak of a night attack on Kilgobbin Castle, made by an armed party of six or seven men with faces blackened, and their complete repulse through the heroic conduct of a young lady.’ ‘The main facts, then, include no mention of poor Walpole and his misfortune?’ ‘I don’t think that we mere Irish attach any great importance to a broken arm, whether it came of a cricket-ball or gun; but we do interest ourselves deeply when an Irish girl displays feats of heroism and courage that men find it hard to rival.’ ‘It was very fine,’ said Lockwood gravely. ‘Fine! I should think it was fine!’ burst out Atlee. ‘It was so fine that, had the deed been done on the other side of this narrow sea, the nation would not have been satisfied till your Poet Laureate had commemorated it in verse.’ ‘Have they discovered any traces of the fellows?’ said Lockwood, who declined to follow the discussion into this channel. ‘My father has gone over to Moate to-day,’ said Kearney, now speaking for the first time, ‘to hear the examination of two fellows who have been taken up on suspicion.’ ‘You have plenty of this sort of thing in your country,’ said Atlee to Nina. ‘Where do you mean when you say my country?’ ‘I mean Greece.’ ‘But I have not seen Greece since I was a child, so high; I have lived always in Italy.’ ‘Well, Italy has Calabria and the Terra del Lavoro.’ ‘And how much do we in Rome know about either?’ ‘About as much,’ said Lockwood, ‘as Belgravia does of the Bog of Allen.’ ‘You’ll return to your friends in civilised life with almost the fame of an African traveller, Major Lockwood,’ said Atlee pertly. ‘If Africa can boast such hospitality, I certainly rather envy than compassionate Doctor Livingstone,’ said he politely. ‘Somebody,’ said Kearney dryly, ‘calls hospitality the breeding of the savage.’ ‘But I deny that we are savage,’ cried Atlee. ‘I contend for it that all our civilisation is higher, and that class for class we are in a more advanced culture than the English; that your chawbacon is not as intelligent a being as our bogtrotter; that your petty shopkeeper is inferior to ours; that throughout our middle classes there is not only a higher morality but a higher refinement than with you.’ ‘I read in one of the most accredited journals of England the other day that Ireland had never produced a poet, could not even show a second-rate humorist,’ said Kearney. ‘Swift and Sterne were third-rate, or perhaps, English,’ said Atlee. ‘These are themes I’ll not attempt to discuss,’ said Lockwood; ‘but I know one thing, it takes three times as much military force to govern the smaller island.’ ‘That is to say, to govern the country after _your_ fashion; but leave it to ourselves. Pack your portmanteaus and go away, and then see if we’ll need this parade of horse, foot, and dragoons; these batteries of guns and these brigades of peelers.’