mind plainly when Mary entered the farm kitchen.

"I'll not have you talking or walking with Denis Ryan," she said; "nor
your father won't have it! Everybody knows what he is, and what his
friends are. There's nothing too bad for those fellows to do, and no
daughter of mine will mix herself up with them!"

"Denis isn't doing anything wrong, mother," said Mary. "And if he thinks
Ireland ought to be a free republic, hasn't he as good a right to his
own opinion as you or me, or my father either?"

"No man has a right to be shooting and murdering innocent people,
whether they're policemen or whatever they are. And that's what Denis
Ryan and the rest of them are at, day and night, all over the country.
And if they're not doing it here yet, they soon will. Blackguards, I
call them, and the sooner they're hanged the better, every one of them!"

In Flaherty's barn that night the gentleman from Dublin spoke to an
audience of some twenty or thirty young men He spoke with passion and
conviction. He told again the thousand times repeated story of the
wrongs which Ireland has suffered at the hands of the English in
old, old days. He told of more recent happenings, of men arrested
and imprisoned without trial, without even definite accusation, of
intolerable infringements of the common rights. He spoke of the glorious
hope of national liberty, of Ireland as a free Republic. The men he
spoke too, young men all of them, listened with flashing eyes, with
clenched teeth, and faces moist with emotion. They responded to his
words with sudden growings and curses. The speaker went on to tell
of the deeds of men elsewhere in Ireland. "The soldiers of the Irish
Republic," so he called them. They had attacked the armed forces of
English rule. They had stormed police barracks. They had taken arms and
ammunitions where such things were to be found. These, he said, were
glorious deeds wrought by men everywhere in Ireland.

"But what have you done here?" he asked. "And what do you mean to do?"

Michael Murnihan spoke next. He said that he was ashamed of the men
around him and of the club to which he belonged.

"It's a reproach to us," he said, "that we're the only men in Ireland
that have done nothing. Are we ready to fight when the day for fighting
comes? We are not. For what arms have we among us? Only two revolvers.
Two revolvers, and that's all. Not a gun, though you know well, and I
know, that there's plenty of guns round about us in t