ary had written some letter to the press condemning the
"Irish-American Dynamite Party" as it was called, and defining the limits
of "honourable warfare." At the next meeting, the papal soldier rose in
the middle of the discussion on some other matter and moved a vote of
censure on O'Leary. "I myself" he said "do not approve of bombs, but I do
not think that any Irishman should be discouraged." O'Leary ruled him out
of order. He refused to obey and remained standing. Those round him began
to threaten. He swung the chair he had been sitting on round his head and
defied everybody. However he was seized from all sides and thrown out, and
a special meeting called to expel him. He wrote letters to the papers and
addressed a crowd somewhere. "No Young Ireland Society," he protested,
"could expel a man whose grandfather had been hanged in 1798." When the
night of the special meeting came his expulsion was moved, but before the
vote could be taken an excited man announced that there was a crowd in the
street, that the papal soldier was making a speech, that in a moment we
should be attacked. Three or four of us ran and put our backs to the door
while others carried on the debate. It was an inner door with narrow glass
windows at each side and through these we could see the street-door and
the crowd in the street. Presently a man asked us through the crack in the
door if we would as a favour "leave the crowd to the workman's club
upstairs." In a couple of minutes there was a great noise of sticks and
broken glass, and after that our landlord came to find out who was to pay
for the hall-lamp.

XXIX

From these debates, from O'Leary's conversation, and from the Irish books
he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since. I had begun
to know a great deal about the Irish poets who had written in English. I
read with excitement books I should find unreadable to-day, and found
romance in lives that had neither wit nor adventure. I did not deceive
myself, I knew how often they wrote a cold and abstract language, and yet
I who had never wanted to see the houses where Keats and Shelley lived
would ask everybody what sort of place Inchedony was, because Callanan had
named after it a bad poem in the manner of "Childe Harold." Walking home
from a debate, I remember saying to some college student "Ireland cannot
put from her the habits learned from her old military civilization and
from a church that prays in Latin. Those popul