friend William Shakspere.

If they were present at this moment, they would not dare deny the truth of
this memory narrative.

In the summer of 1595, the periodical plague of London was thinning out the
inhabitants of that dirty city. In the lower part of the city skirting the
Thames, the sewerage was very bad and but the poorest sanitary rules
existed. After a hard rain, the lanes, alleys and streets ran with a stream
of putrefaction, as the offal from many tenement houses was thrown in the
public highway, where the rays from the hot sun created malarial fever or
the black plague.

At such times the theatres and churches were closed, and those who could
get out of London, by land or water, fled to the inland shires of England,
the mountains of Scotland or to the heather hills of Ireland.

Edmund Spenser, the poet and Secretary of Lord Gray for Ireland, invited
William and myself to visit his Irish estate near the city of Cork.

One bright morning in May, we boarded the good ship Elizabeth, near the
Tower, passed out of Gravesend, then into the channel and steered our way
to Bantry Bay, until we landed in the cove of Cork, as the church bells
were ringing devotees to early mass.

The green fields and hills of Ireland were blooming in rustic beauty, the
thrush sang from every hawthorn bush, the blackbird was busy in the fields
filching grain from the ploughman, the lark, in his skyward flight poured a
stream of melody on the air, and all Nature seemed happy, but man.

He it is who makes the blooming productive earth miserable, with his
voracious greed for gold and power.

Elizabeth was then waging war with the various Irish chieftains, importing
cunning Scotchmen and brutal Englishmen as soldiers and traders to colonize
the lands and destroy the homes of what she was pleased to call "Barbarous,
rebellious, wild Irish."

Whenever any strong power invades a weaker one for the purpose of robbery
and official murder (war), the tyrant labels his victim--a "Rebel!"

That is, the original owner of the land destined to be robbed is regarded
as bigoted, barbarous and rebellious, unless he submits to be robbed,
banished and murdered for the edification and glory of freebooters,
thieves, tyrants, assassins and foreign man hunters.

Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught, the four provinces of Ireland, had
been marked out for settlement by Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth, and
hordes of English "carpetbaggers" and so