CONTENTS OF VOL. I. PAGE II. HOW THE LORD VISCOUNT MOUNTJOY LAY AT CLONCALLY ON HIS WAY TO DUBLIN HIND HIM 68 888 103 125 SENGER CAME TO CLONCALLY OUT OF DERRY 178 XI. HOW THERE CAME NEWS TO CLONCALLY OF THAT WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN A MASSACRE A MAN'S FOES CHAPTER I. BEGINNING, IRISH FASHION, AT THE END OF THE STORY. STRANGE and very strange it is to reflect upon the changes that one year, one very short year with twelve little months in it, may bring forth. A foam-bell on a stormy sea, were it endowed with sense and memory, might have some such experiences as ours to recall at the end of its day of life. Now on the crest of the wave, now in the trough; now sliding up the slope of the tossing water, now sliding down; now sparkling in a flying ray of sunshine, now dark in the sudden gloom; whelmed under the plunging wave one moment, the next slipping into the free light once more, and in the next after that whirled, perhaps, clean into the air by the wind. The likeness is apt enough between VOL. I. I such an existence as this and the life we have been leading for the last twelve months. A year; and that of the shortest, as it seems when I look back upon it; and yet what long days have been therein-days that seemed to hold months of ordinary life; yes, and that will count for more in our lives than months of ordinary life. Perhaps it needed more than the strength that will carry one through months of quietness to live through one such day; perhaps our lives have been shortened by just so much. And yet, could the choice be allowed one, to have been in the thick of the fight or quite out of it-a foam-bell on the crest of the wave, or a foam-bell on the eddy of a sheltered brook, where hardly even the sound of the storm can reach it-would one choose the calm? I would not, woman though I be; for such days as these were filled-ay, to overflowing with real life; it was worth living to have the chance of such. And that which hath been done is worth the casting away of a dozen lives, if one had them; how mean and inglorious seems the common round of daily business after the fate of a nation hath hung upon our actions! And yet how sweet and gracious is the orderly succession of daily duties, tame and trivial though they be. It doth seem to me that I never so much enjoyed |