On this score, when at last I reached Lake House, I had no personal complaint to make. My agent told me that certain Sinn Feiners had been billeted on me and certain stores of food commandeered; my gun-room had been emptied; but both my cars, after a short period of detention, were returned with a permit from republican headquarters. This, I believe, made them liable to seizure by the forces of the crown; but my agent warned me that any license which recognized the authority of Dublin Castle would cause the cars to be taken and not restored. And nothing in Kerry tempted the Castle to send its emissaries so far into hostile territory. If I abstained from provocative acts or speeches, I should be left in peace. “They like you,” my agent was good enough to tell me; “and it’s what they’re all saying, that you should be living here.” “Are the tenants paying me any rent?,” I asked. “They are.” I drifted away by myself to see how well the house would suit Barbara. The lake was like a sheet of glass, in a frame of dense green wood, hanging from the gardens by the red ribands of the fuchsia hedges. Here and there I saw thin spirals of smoke: it was turf smoke, though I could not smell it. From Castlemaine, in the west, the air blew soft and salt from the Atlantic. I cursed the malevolence of man that disturbed such peace and desecrated such beauty. I cursed, too, the fate that had sent me to an English school, because there was none good enough in Ireland, so robbing me of one home without giving me another. “I’m a married man,” I told my agent, “since last I was here. I don’t care to bring my wife over till things are more settled.” That, he assured me regretfully, was what every one said; but I should be comfortable enough if I did not make trouble. He was himself an avowed republican, not from any hostility to the king, whom he admired, nor from devotion to the forms and spirit of republicanism: he wanted peace; and, whether Sinn Fein would achieve it or not, no other party had succeeded. Sinn Fein was feared, if not respected; and the English only remembered Ireland when they were frightened. If Redmond and his lot had put the fear of God into the English one half as well as the others, they would be lords and ministers and the rest now, like Mr. Law and the man who prosecuted Roger Casement. My agent disapproved of Sir Edward Carson’s politics but admired him as the Irishman who had put more fear of God into the English than any one since Parnell. The one sentimental relaxation that this hard-headed, soft-spoken man allowed himself was that Parnell was still alive and would come back to lead Ireland. “If I could find a purchaser . . .” I began. “An Englishman? The house would be burnt over your honour’s head if the whisper of it ran round!” “Then,” I said, “I may as well be getting back to London.”