"I don't think he intends to," said Godfrey, "but he did not give me a decided answer." Our police sergeant is a man of sense. "Did you say," I asked, "that they're going to march to Belfast?" "That's what the sergeant told me," said Godfrey. "Actually walk the whole way?" Belfast is a good many miles away from us. It would, I suppose, take a quick walker the better part of two days to accomplish the journey. "He said 'march,'" said Godfrey. "I suppose he meant to walk." This is, as we are constantly reminded, the twentieth century. I should have supposed that any one who wanted to get from this place to Belfast would have gone in a train. Our nearest railway station is some way off, but one might walk to it in an hour and a half. Once there, the journey to Belfast can be accomplished in another two hours. It seems rather absurd to spend two days over it, but then the whole thing is rather absurd. The rifles are absurd. The gathering of three hundred men into a church to indulge in a kind of grace before meat as preparation for a speech from Babberly is rather absurd. To set a peal of bells playing--but I am not quite sure about the hymn tune. It did not sound to me absurd as it came across the bay. I am, I trust, a reasonable man, not peculiarly liable to be swept off my feet by waves of emotion; but there was something in the sound of that hymn tune which prevented me from counting it, along with our other performances, as an absurdity. CHAPTER XVII The Dean and his men did actually march to Belfast. I saw them there two days later. I also saw them start, ranged in very fair order with the Dean at their head. The most surprising thing about their march was that they had no band. There are at least two bands in the town. I subscribe to both of them regularly and have occasionally given a donation to a third which enjoys an intermittent existence, springing into sudden activity for a week or two and then disappearing for months. I asked the police sergeant, who is a South of Ireland man and very acute of mind, why none of the bands accompanied the army. The explanation he gave me was interesting and suggestive. "There isn't as much as a boy in the district," he said, "who'd content himself with a drum when he might have the handling of a rifle." And yet an excessive fondness for drums has been reckoned--by English politicians--one of the failings of the Ulster man.