"Ay, ay, lad, dinna fash yoursel'," he interrupted kindly, to save me the embarrassment of an avowal. "Betty has telt me that you want her. She micht dae waur, ye ken. Dinna you fash yoursel' aboot that." It may seem a grudging aoceptance of a son-in-law, that "she micht dae waur," but the doctor was an undemonstrative old Scotsman, and the kindly pressure of his hand on mine meant more than the words. "You'll be wantin' tae ken the end o' your adventure, I'm thinkin'?" he asked, quickly changing the subject. "Yes," I answered eagerly. "What has become of Roy, and the Laird, and Marie? Where is Morgan? And-" "Yin at a time-yin at a time," the doctor interrupted, smiling at my eagerness. "I'd best juist tell ye the story in my ain words. "Pair Roy!" He paused to let these words sink into my mind, and thus break the news more gently. "He was a fine lad, was Roy. It was a peety he got mixed up wi' that furrin woman. . . He was deid when they found him. Him an' his faither- baith, Hoo it was that you escapit alive, Guid kens. But there wisna muckle life in you, come tae think on it. The caur loupit doon intae the bed o' the burn, a maitter o' fifty feet or mair, an' smashed itsel' tae smithereens again' the stanes. They brocht you back for deid, but Betty wud ha'e it that there was life in you, an' sure eneuch she was richt." Her "And Marie?" I asked. "I ken nowt o' her. disappearance wisna brocht up at the inquiry. The twa things werena connected. But she hisna been seen since." "Then the Hopeton treasure is lost?" I exclaimed. "So I understand frae Betty. I only ken what she has telt me aboot the treasure. The furrin woman is clear awa' wi' it-o' that you may be shair." I lay silent, thinking of what he had told me. "Perhaps it is as well," I said at last. "It has caused enough trouble, and I doubt if it will bring much happiness to Marie. By the way, how long have I been ill?" "Mair ner a month," replied Dr Forbes, to my astonishment. "And what of Morganwhere is he now?" siolike, for the last week or mair. If you think it's no' ower muckle for you, we micht let him in the morn, juist lang eneuch tae speir the time o' day." So next day I saw Morgan's beaming spectacles once again. He was unaffectedly delighted to see me, and stood rubbing his hands and exclaiming, for an unconscionable time "Dear, dear, dear! This is a great day, Seaton. That jailer of yours is a holy terror. I should have seen you a week ago, but for his rules and regulations. He's worse than a New York hall-porter." I smiled upon him and let him talk. "Well, well, it's all over now, thank God, but I can't look at you lying there without blaming myself for your troubles. I got you into all this mess, Seaton, with these damned little pictures. Even at the last, I cried to you to do something, and landed you in for that unholy smash. Nobody but you knows what really happened that night. Was it an accident?" Now I knew, as surely as I knew anything on this earth, that Roy had deliberately pulled the car across the road to save his false wife. He did it with a full knowledge of what would be the end, but what good would come from speaking of it. "Yes," I answered. "A pure accident. The light was bad. . . . The Laird was driving.. He did not see the bend in the road." "You had marvellous ... escape. Dear, dear, dear, there wasn't a sporting chance in a million that you'd be alive— yet here you are, as full of beans as a pod." "What of Marigold?" I asked. "She is recovering," answered Morgan. "It was a terrible shock to her, but she is getting over it. Seaton, my boy, I've overcome all her objections at last, and she's going to marry me and come with me to the States. We shall take young Duncan with us, and let Hopeton until he grows up." "The best thing you could do," I agreed heartily. "Take her right away to fresh surroundings. She could never be be happy here." I was well enough to be at Marigold's wedding. It was a very quiet wedding, but looking at the faces of the bride and bridegroom I knew that it would turn out a happy BEFORE THE UNION: GRATTAN'S PEOPLE. BY J. A. STRAHAN. BOTH Swift and Grattan object to those who walk through this great town [Dublin], or travel in the oountry, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabindoors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms." And in recommending that the children should be eaten, he indicates clearly enough the cause of their awful poverty. "I grant," he says, "this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children." In Grattan's day their condition is described by Lord Clare: "I say it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable tenantry. I know that the unhappy tenants are ground to powder by relentless landlords. "And again: "This island is supposed to contain three millions of inhabitants. Of these, two live like the beasts of the field upon a root picked out of the earth, almost without hovels for shelter or clothes for covering." It is to be noted that Swift and Clare were both Tories of the highest type: the men who were fighting for "the people's rights" had, so far as I oan discover, no more bowels of compassion for the physical miseries of the farmers and labourers than had Mr were Irish patriots, though two men more different in their nature and in their outlook on life it would be difficult to imagine. Swift was an Anglo-Saxon in everything except birth; Grattan was an Irish Celt in everything except name. Swift was sparing in words, but you always know what he means; Grattan was profuse in words, but sometimes does not know what he means himself. Swift was a hater of mankind who, during his life, devoted a third of his income, and at his death left all his fortune, in charities to men. Grattan was a lover of mankind who, during his life, spent more than his income on himself, and at his death left little fortune for anybody. Swift's active life occupied the first part of the first half of the eighteenth century; Grattan's the second part of the second half of the eighteenth century. Save in one respect, the Irelands of those two periods were as different as Swift and Grattan. The one respect in which the two Irelands were the same was the misery of the majority of the population-the common enemy of Swift's, the dangerous Papists of Grattan's time. In his 'Modest Proposal for Utilising the Children of Poor People in Ireland,' Swift desoribes their condition in his his day: "It is a melancholy Bright and his fellow Radicals for the physical miseries of the factory hands. When Englishmen endow the stage Irishman with an inexhaustible fund of reckless gaiety, they are really attributing to the Celt peasant the characteristie of the Saxon landlord. The Celt in Ireland has had, during the last seven centuries, plenty of cause for recklessness but very little for gaiety; and every one who knows him as he is recognises as his most noticeable characteristio a habitual melancholy - which, the late Lord Beaconsfield once said, was due to his proximity to the melancholy ocean. A mere likely cause is his long unhappiness. It is, as a rule, only when he has, as they say in Ireland, "drink taken" that he is gay; and in the eighteenth century that gaiety took usually the rather disagreeable form of faction-fighting. The best description of the factionfights, which for generations followed every country fair, is given by the late Mr W. R. Le Fanu in his 'Seventy Years of Irish Life.' Dealing with the fights in County Limerick between the Coffeys and the Reaskawallahs, he says they did not begin with one man trailing his coat on the ground and daring any one to tread on it. They began by a man "wheeling," as they called it, for his party: that is, he marched up and down flourishing his blackthorn, and shouting "Here is Coffey aboo against Reaskawallahs! Here is Coffey aboo - who dar strike a Coffey?" "I dar!" shouted a Reaskawallah. "Here's Reaskawallah aboe!" And then the struggle began. The parish priest and his curate would ride among the fighting men, striking right and left with their whips; but the struggle would not end until the weaker faction Was driven from the field, leaving a few dead and many dangerously wounded behind them. This was the form Irish Celtic hilarity took in the eighteenth century. One of Daniel O'Connell's best services to his country was putting a stop to it by denouncing it as unpatriotic and a shame to Ireland, As It was during the agony of that awful eighteenth century that the Catholic priest aoquired that authority over the Irish peasant which makes him the real ruler of the country till this day. Swift says, the landlords were devouring the tenantry; Clare says, they were grinding them to powder. In their misery the only person who brought them help or hope was the priest. At first he did so at the risk of murder or mutilation; but whatever the dangers he had to face, he never failed them in their hours of sorrow, sickness, and death. "Who, in the winter's night, 1 Priest dear. Came to my cabin-door they were bitterly opposed to it but they talked much about Protestant Ascendaney. This did not mean that they continued to persecute Catholicsin fact they had become very tolerant; it merely meant that they were Protestants, and that they were determined to maintain their own ascendancy Anglo Irish, in other words, to keep what they already possessed, all the powers, places, and profits in the country. The difference between the Ireland of Swift's and the Ireland of Grattan's day lay not among the Celtic Irish but among the Anglo-Irish. At the beginning of the eighteenth century whether English or Soots, landowners or farmers or flaxspinners, were one people with a commen hatred of the Celtio Irish-"the common enemy." At the end of it they were two peoples-a farming and flaxspinning people in the North, who were Soots and had become very discontented, and a landowning and roistering people, scattered throughout the whole country, who were very contented and had become Irish. The farming and flax-spinning people in the North need hardly be considered. Save that they were much less poor and were much more independent, they were in nearly the same position as the Celtio, or as they were now called the Catholic, Irish. They had practically nothing to do with the government of the country; and, since their Volunteers failed to get Grattan's Parliament reformed, they regarded it with hatred and contempt. The landowning and roistering people, on the other hand, owned not merely the land but everything else in the country which was worth owning. They made all the laws, filled all the places, and pocketed all the taxes. They had ceased to talk of English Ascendancy-indeed, Considering what human nature is this is not to be wondered at. If all the rest of the population was steeped in poverty and gloom, they were rolling in riches and gaiety. Some one has said that no one ever fully felt the joy of life except a French nobleman of the age before the French Revolution. I am not so sure of that. At any rate, the Irish nobleman of the age before the Irish Union had a very jolly time of it. Like his French brother, he built stately mansions among the mud-cabins of his tenantry, feasted while they starved, forced them to make roads for his convenience, and whipped them off them when they got in his way. He drank, dioed, danced, and duelled to his heart's content, without giving a thought as to whether they were living or dying. The French nobleman came to a sudden end about the close of the eighteenth century; so would have the Irish nobleman but for the help of England, whose interference in his affairs he so deeply detested. These were the glorious days of Dublin. As some one has |