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the room to meet the approaching visitor. She reached the vestibule just in time to see the door opened, and to recognise a gentleman who was descending from the carriage that had drawn up in front of the house.

It was the Rev. Charles Viking. The terror and dismay that filled Lily's mind at this discovery cannot be described. A thousand wild fears flashed through her brain, and a thousand desperate resolves rose in their train. Instant action, however, was necessary, and she at once fled from the hall to her room where, after carefully locking both the doors, she remained to await what fresh catastrophes might be impending.

Charles, meanwhile, had not noticed Lily, and was inquiring for the housekeeper. Upon Mrs. Bolster appearing, he mentioned that he was a clergyman and that he had come to make inquiries after Elsie, and to deliver a message on behalf of the gentleman who had been with her on the night of her arrival.

"I am indeed very happy to hear you say so,” said Mrs. Bolster; "I did think it very cruel of the gentleman not so much as to write to the poor girl; but there-I daresay there's been something to prevent it. You must, however, see Miss Dawes yourself. She is still bad enough to keep her bed, but since yesterday she has vastly improved, and will soon be well enough to get about. Follow me, sir. How delighted the dear girl will be, to be sure?"

They proceeded together to Elsie's

room.

On the door being opened a spectacle of surpassing pathos and loveliness presented itself. The snowwhite curtains of the bed were drawn aside and looped up, and from the open window the fragrant morning breeze gently floated in to chase away all sorrow from the maiden's soul. Elsie was lying propped up

by soft pillows, over which her golden tresses spread themselves like some angelic halo, while her delicate face, rendered white and transparent by her illness, was at that moment decked with a roseate flush of excitement, and her eyes beamed radiantly with the happiness that she so surely presaged. She had taken some flowers from a table that stood at the bedside, and was holding them forth towards the door by which she expected her lover to enter, smiling meanwhile with such sweet witchery on her countenance that the very sunbeams falling on her hair and alabaster neck seemed to hover there entranced by her ravishing beanty.

A fell shadow spread itself over the scene as Charles entered. The sun outside continued to shine, but the flowers dropped from Elsie's outstretched hand, a desparing cry issued from her lips, and the pallor of death overspread her cheeks and dimmed the radiance of her glance.

"Leave us awhile," said Charles, turning to Mrs. Bolster, and speaking in a frigid, inflexible tone of voice.

Mrs. Bolster looked earnestly at Charles for a moment, and then, solemnly lifting her hands and eyes to heaven, she slowly quitted the room, gently closing the door after her.

Charles approached the bed where Elsie lay so still and pale. At first he thought she had fainted; but just as he was about to take some water to sprinkle on her face, she softly, and, as it were, painfully, unclosed her eyes, and looked up at him so piteously that he was fain to avert his glance, and a most unusual emotion sped through his heart.

"Why have you come here ?" said Elsie, in tones so low that he could scarcely distinguish her words.

"I come from Mr. Littlemore," replied Charles, taking a seat, and slowly removing his gloves.

The flush reappeared on Elsie's face, and she said, almost eagerly"From Mr. Littlemore! Is he ill? What message does he send?" "He is not ill, but he is unable to come himself to see you," said Charles.

"Then," said Elsie to herself, in the sweetest of whispers, and clasping her hands together as though thanking Providence, "he loves me still-he loves me still!"

"The message I bring from him," continued Charles, in a constrained voice, "is for your real happiness and good."

Actuated by one of the graceful impulses of her soft soul, Elsie turned to the clergyman, and rewarding him with a bright glance of gratitude, she picked up the flowers and offered them for his accept

ance.

PAST AND PRESENT IRISH DISCONTENT.

SUPERFICIAL persons, who have not studied the Irish question in a comprehensive manner, looking at the events of the last three years, may be inclined to agree with those fatalists, condemned justly by Sir George Lewis, who "conceive that there is an innate tendency in the Irish race to disturbance and outrage, that Ireland is cut off from the rest of the civilised world, and has been predoomed to endless disorder." During that period the last real grievances of the nation have been completely removed; and in the Church and the Land Acts the demands were more than fully conceded which had promised to satisfy Irish opinion. It might have been supposed that these reforms would have been hailed with general good-will; that they would have dissipated the worst elements of Irish violence and discontent; that they would have been marked by the cessation of crime and the growth of a loyal and peaceful spirit; and that a tranquil and happy era would have closed the pages of a disastrous history. These sanguine anticipations, however, have been to a great extent frustrated, nor can it be said that a prospect exists that they will soon be fully realised. The years 18691870 were seasons of fierce agitation in Ireland, and witnessed a sudden and fierce outburst of her old plague of agrarian disorder; severe measures of coercion were considered necessary for the island; the administration of criminal justice has been since defied and baffled in more than one remarkable case; and at this moment a popular movement, is seeking to separate Ireland from Great Britain, and to effect the dismemberment of the Empire. We cannot wonder, therefore, that many who have not

given their minds to Irish history, or who have not set to heart the the political truth, that national changes must be gradual, should believe that all that is wrong in Ireland is as bad as it has ever been, and that the elements of violent outrage are as active and perilous there as of old, and should almost despair of the fate of a country from which it seems impossible to expel the evil spirit of lawless turbulence. Yet, if, as candid inquirers, we look across large spaces of time, it is not difficult to show that the peculiar disorders under which Ireland has long suffered have steadily and remarkably decreased; that the characteristic forms of Irish crime have recently diminished in general prevalence, and are less formidable in their essential type; that Irish disturbances are, at this time, less deeprooted and really dangerous than they were not many years ago; that the moral temper and condition of the country have, in spite of all that is said, improved; that Ireland, in a word, is no exception to the broad rule that justice and right will ultimately make their presence felt, whatever the evils they seek to remove. The evidence on this subject would fill volumes, but we shall confine ourselves to a few documents, for the most part the contemporary records of persons charged with the administration of justice, whose opinions deservedly carry weight.

The peculiar crime of Ireland has been for years a tendency to lawless combinations directed mainly against the rights of landlords, but sometimes allied with revolutionary projects and occasionally, in its worst excesses, breaking out into a wild conspiracy against order and society

itself. This form of disorder, although, no doubt, remotely connected with the old feud of race which came down from the age of conquest, made itself conspicuous for the first time about 1760 in some of the Midland and Southern Counties. In many districts, owing either to the increase of their poverty or of their power, as the population had begun to multiply, the peasantry rose in savage insurrection, and for years parts of Leinster and Munster were scenes of deeds of atrocious outrage. This movement, which associated itself with something of the same kind in Ulster, bore most of the features of disorders which have ever since afflicted the country. The combination was general and widespread; it was essentially of an agrarian type; it was supposed to have some public design; and it was not only disgraced by ruthless cruelties, but it degenerated into little better than the worst Jacquerie. Arthur Young, almost an eyewitness, gives us this account of this wild outbreak:"These disturbances began in Tipperary, and were owing to some enclosures of commons, which the Whiteboys, as they are called, threw down, levelling the ditches, and were first known by the name of levellers. After that they began with the tithe proctors (who are men that hire the tithes of the rectors), and these proctors either screwed the cotters up to the the utmost shilling or re-let the tithes to such as did it. It was a common practice with them to go in parties about the country, swearing many to be true to them, and forcing them to join by manaces, which they very often carried into execution. At last they set up to be general redressers of grievances, punished all obnoxious persons who advanced the value of lands, or hired farms over their heads, and, having taken the administration of justice into their own hands, were not very exact in he administration of it. They forced

masters to release their apprentices, carried off the daughters of rich farmers, ravished them into marriages, of which four instances happened in a fortnight. They levied sums of money on the middling and lower farmers in order to support their cause by paying attorneys, &c., in defending prosecutions against them; and many of them subsisted for some years without work, supported by their contributions. The barbarities they committed were shocking. One of their usual punishments (and by no means the most severe) was taking people out of their beds, carrying them naked, in winter, on horseback for some distance, and burying them up to their chins in a hole filled with briars, not forgetting to cut off one of their ears."

We see, also, in this Whiteboy movement the other melancholy associations which characterise agrarian crime in Ireland, the difficulty of procuring evidence, and the sympathy, at least for a time, of the people with those who were transgressing the law. Arthur Young says:-"Many of the magistrates were active in apprehending them, but the want of evidence prevented punishments, for many of those who even suffered by them had not spirit to prosecute. The gentlemen of the country had frequent expeditions to discover them in arms, but their intelligence was so uncommonly good by their influence over the common people, that not one party that ever went in quest of them was successful."

The immediate cause of this insurrection, which seems to have been extremely atrocious, was, undoubtedly, landlord wrong and oppression. The dreamers who think that in those days the relation of landlord and tenant in Ireland was gracefully feudal and patriarchal, will do well to read these words from a speech of Lord Clare in the Irish House of Commons, corroborated in Edmund Burke's correspondence:-"I am

very well acquainted with the province of Munster, and I know that it is impossible for human wretchedness to exceed that of the miserable peasantry in that province. I know that the unhappy peasantry are ground to powder by relentless landlords. It is impossible

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for them to exist in the extreme wretchedness under which they labour. A poor man is obliged to pay £6 for an acre of potato ground, which £6 he is obliged to work out with his landlord at 5d. a day."

The cruelties perpetrated by the Whiteboys were fearful. Lord Clare gives us an instance of practices apparently common :-" Wherever they went they found the people as ready to take an oath as they were to propose it; but if any one did resist, the torments which he was doomed to undergo were too horrible even for savages to be guilty of. In the middle of the night he was dragged from his bed, and buried alive in a grave filled with thorns; or he was set naked on horseback, and tied to a saddle covered with thorns; in addition to this, perhaps, his ears were sawed off."

The Irish Parliament characteristically refused to inquire into the causes of the mischief or to devise a single remedial measure except laws of extreme severity. As there was no real police in the country the insurrection was hardly checked; but some Special Commissions were issued in which the Irish judges made themselves notorious for extravagant harshness. One, an Englishman, Aston, was a bright exception, and his conduct was appreciated by the peasantry, who, whatever their faults, have always shown a keen sympathy with true justice. It is recorded:-" Aston did his duty, but in the discharge of it would not violate the dictates of humanity. On his return from Dublin he was witness to a sight most affecting, and which he must have beheld with the highest satis

faction. For above ten miles from Clonmel, both sides ot the road were lined with men, women, and children, who, as he passed along, kneeled down and supplicated Heaven to bless him as their protector and guardian angel."

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The Whiteboy movement, sometimes quiesent, and sometimes reappearing in vigour, continued in different parts of Ireland until the close of the last century. It then became more or less connected with the rebellious outbreak of 1798-9, and, so to speak, was swallowed up in it. It is not our purpose to retrace the horrors of that disastrous and evil time; suffice it to say that the revolutionary spirit allied itself to agrarian disorder, and that the atrocities of the peasantry were rivalled by those of the Orange faction, state at once of fury and terror. It was, in fact, a war of races and creeds; and moderation was only to be found among the officers of the English army and in the closet of the humane Cornwallis, whose conduct deserves the highest praise. In the agitated period which followed the Union, agrarian troubles broke out again, and the Midland Counties, and even Connaught, became centres of wild conspiracies and barbarous deeds of blood and outrage. By this time, though the war prices maintained a kind of fictitious prosperity, the extraordinary growth of the Irish population had reduced millions to the verge of pauperism; and in the wretchedness of these swarming masses abundant elements existed for the exasperation and increase of disturbance. We quote from a speech of the Attorney-General of the day a description of the agrarian confederacies in Sligo and Mayo in 1806-7:"The mode taken to accomplish their objects has been assembling themselves at night in disguise, sometimes with arms, going to the houses of such persons as refuse to associate themselves in their body, and, if necessary for their purpose,

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