ay their rent as usual, and why? Because they expect the Irish
legislature to give them even better terms--or even to get the land
for nothing. Retributive justice is satisfied. For the last twenty
years the landlords have suffered fearfully. The present bill is
radically unsound, and I trust it will never become law."

And this was all that the one specimen of a Protestant Home Ruler I
have found in Ireland could say in favour of his views! His
intelligence and probity compelled him to denounce Mr. Gladstone's
Bill as "unjust" and radically unsound, and his patriotism caused him
to pray that it might never become law! I left him more Unionist than
ever.

The great Orange leader of Derry, Mr. John Guy Ferguson, once Grand
Ruler, and of world-wide fame, deprecated appeal to arms, except under
direst necessity. "I should recommend resistance to all except the
Queen's troops. Before all things a sincere loyalist, I should never
consent to fire a shot on them. Others think differently, and in case
of pressure and excitement the most regrettable things might happen.
The people of Derry are full of their great victory of 1688, and
believe that their one hundred and five days' resistance saved England
from Catholic tyranny. The Bishop of Derry, as you know, had ordered
that the troops of King James should be admitted when the thirteen
Prentice Boys closed the gate on the very nose of his army." I saw the
two white standards taken from the Catholic troops flanking the high
altar of the Cathedral; which also contains the grandly-carved case of
an organ taken from a wreck of the Spanish Armada in 1588, just a
century before the siege. The people have ever before them these
warlike spoils, which may account for their martial spirit. An old
Prentice Boy told me of the great doings of 1870, how a Catholic
publican, one O'Donnell, endeavoured to prevent the annual marching of
the Boys, who on the anniversary of the raising of the siege, parade
the walls, fire guns, and burn traitor Lundy in effigy; how 5,000 men
in sleeve-waistcoats entered the town to stop the procession, how the
military intervened, and forbade both marching and burning; how the
Boys seized the Town Hall, and in face of 1,700 soldiers and police
burnt an effigy hanging from a high window, which the authorities
could not reach; how Colonel Hillier broke down the doors and stormed
the hall at the bayonet's point, to search both sexes for arms.
Gleefully he produced