In the early spring of 1920 I dragged myself away from my pleasant surroundings in Grantham Street, and traversing the fair plains of Fingal. I went to spend a month in royal Meath, at the foot of the Hill of Tara. It was my first stay in royal Meath, the garden of Ireland’s kings in the days of her greatness. The first day I climbed the hill—I stayed for an hour on its summit, living in the past, in spiritual association with the warriors of old, and wondering if ever again our land would see the day when her sons and daughters would have shaken the shackles of slavery from their limbs and have flung their flag proudly to the breeze, defiant and free. There is little now on the Hill to tell of those days of our greatness. No men crowd its summit; tradition says that the curse of a saint from my own county brought about the ruin and decay of Tara. But the great Banquet Hall could still be traced where the High Kings received homage from their vassals and bestowed hospitality upon their subjects. But a little cross on the summit marks the “Croppies’ Grave,” where “many a Saxon foeman fell, and many an Irish soldier true”—the last resting place of the dauntless few who struck a blow for Ireland in ’98, and fell with their face to the enemy. And I knelt on the green sward of the deserted palace and prayed that the Croppies’ sacrifice might not be in vain; that their dream might come true even in our generation, and that I might be given strength and courage to speed the day. There on the sod hallowed by the footsteps of Ireland’s warrior saints and kings of peace I realised for the first time the full meaning of that little poem of Moore’s, with its pathetic appeal that always grips the Irish heart and dims the patriot’s eye. “Let Erin remember the days of old Ere her faithless sons betrayed her!” And then my eyes wandered over the plains at my feet—richer than my own Golden Vale. Here and there I saw a stately mansion or a castle; but I knew that these were not the homes of the clansmen of our kings, but the fortresses of those who had deprived them of their heritage. Of farm houses there were none; a labourer’s cottage here and there marked the home of the Gaels who had survived—to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water. I searched the countryside for the men that this fair land should have raised; but the roads were deserted; the bullock had replaced the king and the peasant. And I asked myself did Providence ordain that Meath should be the home of the bullock to feed the conquering Saxon. No! It could not be. It was the old curse, the old blight of the foreigner.