An Irish Problem
Conversation raged on the long flanks of the mail-car.
An elderly priest, with a warm complexion and a controversial under-lip, was expounding his native country to a fellow-traveller, with slight but irrepressible pulpit gestures of the hand. The fellow traveller, albeit lavender-hued from an autumn east wind, was obediently observing the anæmic patches of oats and barley, pale and thin, like the hair of a starving baby, and the huge slants of brown heather and turf bog, and was interjecting “Just so!” at decent intervals. Now and then, as the two tall brown mares slackened for a bout of collar-work at a hill, or squeezed slowly past a cart stacked high with sods of turf, we, sitting in silence, Irish wolves in the clothing of English tourists, could hear across the intervening pile of luggage and bicycles such a storm of conversation as bursts forth at a dinner-party after the champagne has twice gone round.
The brunt of the talk was borne by the old lady in the centre. Her broad back, chequered with red plaid, remained monumental in height and stillness, but there was that in the tremor of the steel spray in her bonnet that told of a high pressure of narrative. The bearded Dublin tourist on her left was but little behind her in the ardour of giving information. His wife, a beautifully dressed lady with cotton-wool in her ears, remained abstracted, whether from toothache, or exclusiveness, or mere wifely boredom, we cannot say. Among the swift shuttles of Irish speech the ponderous questions and pronouncements of an English fisherman drove their way. The talk was, we gathered, of sport and game laws and their administration.
“Is it hares?” cried the Dublin tourist, perorating after a flight or two into the subject of poachers; “what d’ye think would happen a hare in Donegal?”
His handsome brown eye swept his audience, even, through the spokes of a bicycle, gathering in our sympathies. It left no doubts as to the tragedy that awaited the hare.
The east wind hunted us along the shore of the wide, bleak bay, rimmed with yellow sea-weed, and black and ruffled like the innumerable lakelets that lay along our route. The tall mountain over it was hooded in cloud. It seemed as threatening and mysterious as Sinai; ready to utter some awful voice of law to the brown solitudes and windy silences.
Far ahead of us a few houses rose suddenly above the low coast line, an ugly family party of squat gables and whitewashed walls, with nothing nearer them to westward than the homesteads of America.
Far and near there was not a tree visible, nor a touch of colour to tell of the saving grace of flowers. The brown mares swung the car along with something resembling enthusiasm; Letterbeg was the end of their stage; it was the end of ours also. Numb with long sitting we dropped cumbrously to earth from the high footboard, and found ourselves face to face with the problem of how to spend the next three hours. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, too early for lunch, though, apparently, quite the fashionable hour in Letterbeg for bottled porter, judging by the squeak of the corkscrew and the clash of glasses that issued from the dark interior of the house in front of which we had been shed by the mail-car. This was a long cottage with a prosperous slate roof, and a board over its narrow door announcing that one Jas. Heraty was licensed for the retail of spirits and porter.
The mail-car rolled away; as it crawled over the top of a hill and sank out of sight a last wave of the priestly hand seemed to include us. Doubtless we were being expounded as English tourists, and our great economic value to the country was being expatiated upon. The rôle is an important one, and has its privileges; yet, to the wolf, there is something stifling in sheep’s clothing; certainly, on the occasions when it was discarded by us, a sympathy and understanding with the hotels was quickly established. Possibly they also are wolves. Undoubtedly the English tourist, with his circular ticket and his coupons, does not invariably get the best of everything. We write surrounded by him and his sufferings. An earlier visit than usual to the hotel sitting-room has revealed him, lying miserably on the sofa, shrouded in a filthy duvet, having been flung there at some two in the morning on his arrival, wet through, from heaven knows what tremendous walk. Subsequently we hear him being haled from his lair by the chambermaid, who treats him as the dirt under her feet (or, indeed, if we may judge by our bedroom carpet, with far less consideration).
“Here!” she says, “go in there and wash yerself!”
We hear her slamming him into a room from which two others of his kind have been recently bolted like rabbits, by the boots, to catch the 6 A.M. train. We can just faintly realise its atmosphere.
This, however, is a digression, but remotely connected with Letterbeg and Mr. Heraty’s window, to which in our forlorn state we turned for distraction.
It was very small, about two feet square, but it made its appeal to all the needs of humanity from the cradle to the grave. A feeding-bottle, a rosary, a photograph of Mr. Kruger, a peg-top, a case of salmon flies, an artistic letter-weight, consisting of a pigeon’s egg carved in Connemara marble, two seductively small bottles of castor-oil—these, mounted on an embankment of packets of corn-flour and rat poison, crowded the four little panes. Inside the shop the assortment ranged from bundles of reaping-hooks on the earthen floor to bottles of champagne in the murk of the top shelf. A few men leaned against the tin-covered counter, gravely drinking porter. As we stood dubiously at the door there was a padding of bare feet in the roadway, and a very small boy with a red head, dressed in a long flannel frock of a rich madder shade fluttered past us into the shop.
“Me dada says let yees be hurrying!” he gasped, between spasms of what was obviously whooping-cough. “Sweeny’s case is comin’ on!”
Had the message been delivered by the Sergeant-at-Arms it could not have been received with more respectful attention or been more immediately obeyed. The porter was gulped down, one unfinished glass being bestowed upon the Sergeant-at-Arms, possibly as a palliative for the whooping-cough, and the party trooped up the road towards a thatched and whitewashed cottage that stood askew at the top of a lane leading to the seashore. Two tall constables of the R.I.C. stood at the door of the cottage. It came to us, with a lifting of the heart, that we had chanced upon Petty Sessions day in Letterbeg, and this was the court-house.
It was uncommonly hot in what is called in newspapers “the body of the court”. Something of the nature of a rood-screen, boarded solidly up to a height of about four feet, divided the long single room of the cottage; we, with the rest of the public, were penned in the division nearest the door. The cobwebbed boards of the loft overhead almost rested on our hats; the public, not being provided with seats by the Government, shuffled on the earthen floor and unaffectedly rested on us and each other. Within the rood-screen two magistrates sat at a table, with their suite, consisting of a clerk, an interpreter, and a district inspector of police, disposed round them.
“The young fella with the foxy mustash is Docthor Lyden,” whispered an informant in response to a question, “and the owld lad that’s lookin’ at ye now is Heraty, that owns the shop above—”
At this juncture an emissary from the Bench very kindly offered us seats within the rood-screen. We took them, on a high wooden settle, beside the magisterial table, and the business of the court proceeded.
Close to us stood the defendant, Sweeny, a tall elderly man, with a long, composed, shaven face, and an all-observant grey eye: Irish in type, Irish in expression, intensely Irish in the self-possession in which he stood, playing to perfection the part of calm rectitude and unassailable integrity.
Facing him, the plaintiff lounged against the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in a Connemara moorland.
Between the two stood the interpreter—small, old, froglike in profile, full of the dignity of the Government official.
“Well, we should be getting on now,” remarked the Chairman, Heraty, J.P., after some explanatory politeness to his unexpected visitors. “William, swear the plaintiff!”
The oath was administered in Irish, and the orange moustache brushed the greasy Testament. The space above the dado of the partition became suddenly a tapestry of attentive faces, clear-eyed, all-comprehending.
“This case,” announced Mr. Heraty judicially yet not without a glance at the visitors, “is a demand for compensation in the matter of a sheep that was drowned. William”—this to the interpreter—“ask Darcy what he has to say for himself?”
Darcy hitched himself round, still with a shoulder propped against the partition, and uttered, without any enthusiasm, a few nasal and guttural sentences.
“He says, yer worship,” said William, with unctuous propriety, “that Sweeny’s gorsoons were ever and always hunting his sheep, and settin’ on their dog to hunt her, and that last week they dhrove her into the lake and dhrownded her altogether.”
“Now,” said Mr. Heraty, in a conversational tone, “William, when ye employ the word ‘gorsoon,’ do ye mean children of the male or female sex?”
“Well, yer worship,” replied William, who, it may incidentally be mentioned, was himself in need of either an interpreter or of a new and complete set of teeth, “I should considher he meant ayther the one or the other.”
“They’re usually one or the other,” said Doctor Lyden solemnly, and in a stupendous brogue. It was the first time he had spoken; he leaned back, with his hands in his pockets, and surveyed with quiet but very bright eyes the instant grin that illumined the faces of the tapestry.
“Sure William himself is no bad judge of gorsoons,” said Mr. Heraty. “Hadn’t he a christening in his own house three weeks ago?”
At this excursion into the family affairs of the interpreter the grin broke into a roar.
“See now, we’ll ask Mr. Byrne, the schoolmaster,” went on Mr. Heraty with owl-like gravity. “Isn’t that Mr. Byrne that I see back there in the coort? Come forward, Mr. Byrne!”
Thus adjured, a tall, spectacled man emerged from the crowd, and, beaming with a pleasing elderly bashfulness through his spectacles, gave it as his opinion that though gorsoon was a term usually applied to the male child, it was equally applicable to the female. “But, indeed,” he concluded, “the Bench has as good Irish as I have myself, and better.”
“The law requires that the thransactions of this coort shall take place in English,” the Chairman responded, “and we have also the public to consider.”
As it was pretty certain that we were the only persons in the court who did not understand Irish, it was borne in upon us that we were the public, and we appreciated the consideration.
“We may assume, then, that the children that set on the dog wor’ of both sexes,” proceeded Mr. Heraty. “Well, now, as to the dog— William, ask Darcy what sort of dog was it.”
The monotonous and quiet Irish sentences followed one another again.
“That’ll do. Now, William—”
“He says, yer worship, that he was a big lump of a yalla dog, an’ very cross, by reason of he r’arin’ a pup.”
“And ’twas to make mutton-broth for the pup she dhrove Darcy’s sheep in the lake, I suppose?”
A contemptuous smile passed over Darcy’s face as the Chairman’s sally was duly translated to him, and he made a rapid reply.
“He says there isn’t one of the neighbours but got great annoyance by the same dog, yer worship, and that when the dog’d be out by night hunting, there wouldn’t be a yard o’ wather in the lakes but he’d have it barked over.”
“It appears,” observed Dr. Lyden serenely, “that the dog, like the gorsoons, was of both sexes.”
“Well, well, no matther now; we’ll hear what the defendant has to say. Swear Sweeny!” said Mr. Heraty, smoothing his long grey beard, with suddenly remembered judicial severity and looking menacingly over his spectacles at Sweeny. “Here, now! you don’t want an interpreter! You that has a sisther married to a stationmaster and a brother in the Connaught Rangers!”
“I have as good English as anny man in this coort,” said Sweeny morosely.
“Well, show it off man! What defence have ye?”
“I say that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all,” said Sweeny firmly, standing as straight as a ramrod, with his hands behind his back, a picture of surly, wronged integrity. “And there’s no man livin’ can prove she was. Ask him now what way did he know her?”
The question evidently touched Darcy on a tender point. He squared his big shoulders in his white flannel jacket, and turning his face for the first time towards the magistrates delivered a flood of Irish, in which we heard a word that sounded like ullán often repeated.
“He says, yer worships,” translated William, “why wouldn’t he know her! Hadn’t she the ullán on her! He says a poor man like him would know one of the few sheep he has as well as yer worship’d know one o’ yer own gowns if it had sthrayed from ye.”
It is probable that we looked some of the stupefaction that we felt at this remarkable reference to Mr. Heraty’s wardrobe.
“For the benefit of the general public,” said Dr. Lyden, in his languid, subtle brogue, with a side-glance at that body, “it may be no harm to mention that the plaintiff is alluding to the Chairman’s yearling calves and not to his costume.”
“Order now!” said Mr. Heraty severely.
“An’ he says,” continued William, warily purging his frog-countenance of any hint of appreciation, “that Sweeny knew the ullán that was on her as well as himself did.”
“Ullán! What sort of English is that for an interpreter to be using! Do ye suppose the general public knows what is an ullán?” interrupted Mr. Heraty with lightning rapidity. “Explain that now!”
“Why, yer worship, sure anny one in the world’d know what the ullán on a sheep’s back is!” said William, staggered by this sudden onslaught, “though there’s some might call it the rebugh.”
“God help the Government that’s payin’ you wages!” said Mr. Heraty with sudden and bitter ferocity (but did we intercept a wink at his colleague?). “If it wasn’t for the young family you’re r’arin’ in yer old age, I’d commit ye for contempt of coort!”
A frank shout of laughter, from every one in court but the victim, greeted this sally, the chorus being, as it were, barbed by a shrill crow of whooping-cough.
“Mr. Byrne!” continued Mr. Heraty without a smile, “we must call upon you again!”
Mr. Byrne’s meek scholastic face once more appeared at the rood-screen.
“Well, I should say,” he ventured decorously, “that the expression is locally applied to what I may call a plume or a feather that is worn on various parts of the sheep’s back, for a mark, as I might say, of distinction.”
“Thank you, Mr. Byrne, thank you,” said Mr. Heraty, to whose imagination a vision of a plumed or feathered sheep seemed to offer nothing unusual, “remember that now, William!”
Dr. Lyden looked at his watch.
“Don’t you think Sweeny might go on with his defence?” he remarked. “About the children, Sweeny—how many have ye?”
“I have four.”
“And how old are they?”
“There’s one o’ thim is six years an another o’ thim is seven—”
“Yes, and the other two eight and nine, I suppose?” commented Dr. Lyden.
The defendant remained silent.
“Do ye see now how well he began with the youngest—the way we’d think ’twas the eldest!” resumed Dr. Lyden. “I think we may assume that a gorsoon—male or female—of eight or nine years is capable of setting a dog on the sheep.”
Here Darcy spoke again.
“He says,” interpreted William, “there isn’t pig nor ass, sheep nor duck, belongin’ to him that isn’t heart-scalded with the same childhren an’ their dog.”
“Well, I say now, an’ I swear it,” said Sweeny, his eye kindling like a coal, and his voice rising as the core of what was probably an old neighbourly grudge was neared, “my land is bare from his bastes threspassing on it, and my childhren are in dread to pass his house itself with the kicks an’ the sthrokes himself an’ his mother dhraws on them! The Lord Almighty knows—”
“Stop now!” said Mr. Heraty, holding up his hand. “Stop! The Lord’s not intherferin’ in this case at all! It’s me an’ Doctor Lyden has it to settle.”
No one seemed to find anything surprising in this pronouncement; it was accepted as seriously as any similar statement of the Prophet Samuel to the Children of Israel, and was evidently meant to imply that abstract justice might be expected.
“We may assume, then,” said Dr. Lyden amiably, “that the sheep walked out into Sweeny’s end of the lake and drowned herself there on account of the spite there was between the two families.”
The court tittered. A dingy red showed itself among the grizzled hairs and wrinkles on Sweeny’s cheek. In Ireland a point can often be better carried by sarcasm than by logic.
“She was blind enough to dhrown herself, or two like her!” he said angrily; “she was that owld and blind it was ayqual to her where she’d go!”
“How d’ye know she was blind?” said Mr. Heraty quickly.
“I thought the defence opened with the statement that it wasn’t Darcy’s sheep at all,” put in Dr. Lyden, leaning back in his chair with his eyes fixed on the rafters.
Sweeny firmly regarded Mr. Heraty.
“How would I know she was blind?” he repeated. “Many’s the time when she’d be takin’ a sthroll in on my land I’d see her fallin’ down in the rocks, she was that blind! An’ didn’t I see Darcy’s mother one time, an’ she puttin’ something on her eyes.”
“Was it glasses she was putting on the sheep’s eyes?” suggested the Chairman, with a glance that admitted the court to the joke.
“No, but an ointment,” said Sweeny stubbornly. “I seen her rubbing it to the eyes, an’ she no more than thirty yards from me.”
“Will ye swear that?” thundered Mr. Heraty; “will you swear that at a distance of thirty yards you could tell what was between Darcy’s mother’s fingers and the sheep’s eyes? No you will not! Nor no man could! William, is Darcy’s mother in the coort? We’ll have to take evidence from her as to the condition of the sheep’s eyes!”
“Darcy says, yer worship, that his mother would lose her life if she was to be brought into coort,” explained William, after an interlude in Irish, to which both magistrates listened with evident interest; “that ere last night a frog jumped into the bed to her in the night, and she got out of the bed to light the Blessed Candle, and when she got back to the bed again she was in it always between herself and the wall, an’ she got a wakeness out of it, and great cold—”
“Are ye sure it wasn’t the frog got the wakeness?” asked Dr. Lyden.
A gale of laughter swept round the court.
“Come, come!” said Mr. Heraty; “have done with this baldherdash! William, tell Darcy some one must go fetch his mother, for as wake as she is she could walk half a mile!” Mr. Heraty here drew forth an enormous white pocket-handkerchief and trumpeted angrily in its depths.
Darcy raised his small blue eyes with their thick lashes, and took a look at his judge. There was a gabbled interchange of Irish between him and the interpreter.
“He says she could not, yer worship, nor as much as one perch.”
“Ah, what nonsense is this!” said Mr. Heraty testily; “didn’t I see the woman meself at Mass last Sunday?”
Darcy’s reply was garnished with a good deal more gesticulation than usual, and throughout his speech the ironic smile on Sweeny’s face was a masterpiece of quiet expression.
“He says,” said William, “that surely she was at Mass last Sunday, the same as your worship says, but ’twas on the way home that she was taking a wall, and a stone fell on her and hurted her finger and the boot preyed on it, and it has her desthroyed.”
At this culmination of the misadventures of Mrs. Darcy the countenances of the general public must again have expressed some of the bewilderment that they felt.
“Perhaps William will be good enough to explain,” said Dr. Lyden, permitting a faint smile to twitch the foxy moustache, “how Mrs. Darcy’s boot affected her finger?”
William’s skinny hand covered his frog mouth with all a deserving schoolboy’s embarrassment at being caught out in a bad translation.
“I beg yer worships’ pardon,” he said, in deep confusion, “but sure your worships know as well as meself that in Irish we have the one word for your finger or your toe.”
“There’s one thing I know very well anyhow,” said Dr. Lyden, turning to his colleague, “I’ve no more time to waste sitting here talking about old Kit Darcy’s fingers and toes! Let the two o’ them get arbitrators and settle it out of court. There’s nothing between them now only the value of the sheep.”
“Sure I was satisfied to leave it to arbithration, but Darcy wasn’t willin’.” This statement was Sweeny’s.
“So you were willin’ to have arbithration before you came into coort at all?” said Mr. Heraty, eyeing the tall defendant with ominous mildness. “William, ask Darcy is this the case.”
Darcy’s reply, delivered with a slow, sarcastic smile, provoked a laugh from the audience.
“Oh, ho! So that was the way, was it!” cried Mr. Heraty, forgetting to wait for the translation. “Ye had your wife’s cousin to arbithrate! Small blame to Darcy he wasn’t willin’! It’s a pity ye didn’t say your wife herself should arbithrate when ye went about it! You would hardly believe the high opinion Sweeny here has of his wife,” continued the Chairman in illuminative excursus to Dr. Lyden; “sure he had all the women wild below at my shop th’ other night sayin’ his wife was the finest woman in Ireland! Upon my soul he had!”
“If I said that,” growled the unfortunate Sweeny, “it was a lie for me.”
“Don’t ye think it might be a good thing now,” suggested the indefatigable doctor, in his mournful tuneful voice, “to call a few witnesses to give evidence as to whether Mrs. Michael Sweeny is the finest woman in Ireland or no?”
“God knows, gentlemen, it’s a pity ye haven’t more to do this day,” said Sweeny, turning at length upon his tormentors, “I’d sooner pay the price of the sheep than be losin’ me time here this way.”
“See, now, how we’re getting to the rights of it in the latter end,” commented Dr. Lyden imperturbably. “Sweeny began here by saying”—he checked off each successive point on his fingers—“that the sheep wasn’t Darcy’s at all. Then he said that his children of eight and nine years of age were too young to set the dog on the sheep. Then, that if the dog hunted her it was no more than she deserved for constant trespass. Then he said that the sheep was so old and blind that she committed suicide in his end of the lake in order to please herself and to spite him; and, last of all, he tells us that he offered to compensate Darcy for her before he came into court at all!”
“And on top of that,” Mr. Heraty actually rose in his seat in his exquisite appreciation of the position, “on top of that, mind you, after he has the whole machinery of the law and the entire population of Letterbeg attending on him for a matter o’ two hours, he informs us that we’re wasting his valuable time!”
Mr. Heraty fixed his eyes in admirable passion—whether genuine or not we are quite incapable of pronouncing—upon Sweeny, who returned the gaze with all the gloom of an unfortunate but invincibly respectable man.
Dr. Lyden once more pulled out his watch.
“It might be as well for us,” he said languidly, “to enter upon the inquiry as to the value of the sheep. That should take about another three-quarters of an hour. William, ask Darcy the price he puts on the sheep.”
Every emotion has its limits. We received with scarce a stirring of surprise the variations of sworn testimony as to the value of the sheep. Her price ranged from one pound, claimed by Darcy and his adherents, to sixpence, at which sum her skin was unhesitatingly valued by Sweeny. Her age swung like a pendulum between two years and fourteen, and, finally, in crowning proof of her worth and general attractiveness, it was stated that her own twin had been sold for fifteen shillings to the police at Dhulish, “ere last week”. At this re-entrance into the case of the personal element Mr. Heraty’s spirits obviously rose.
“I think we ought to have evidence about this,” he said, fixing the police officer with a dangerous eye. “Mr. Cox, have ye anny of the Dhulish police here?”
Mr. Cox, whose only official act up to the present had been the highly beneficial one of opening the window, admitted with a grin that two of the Dhulish men were in the court.
“Well, then!” continued the Chairman, “Mr. Cox, maybe ye’d kindly desire them to step forward in order that the court may be able to estimate from their appearance the nutritive qualities of the twin sisther of Darcy’s sheep.”
At this juncture we perceived, down near the crowded doorway, two tall and deeply embarrassed members of the R.I.C. hastily escaping into the street.
“Well, well; how easy it is to frighten the police!” remarked the Chairman, following them with a regretful eye. “I suppose, afther all, we’d betther put a price on the sheep and have done with it. In my opinion, when there’s a difficulty like this—what I might call an accident—between decent men like these (for they’re both decent men, and I’ve known them these years), I’d say both parties should share what hardship is in it. Now, doctor, what shall we give Darcy? I suppose if we gave him 8s. compensation and 2s. costs we’d not be far out?”
Dr. Lyden, already in the act of charging his pipe, nodded his head.
Sweeny began to fumble in his pockets, and draw ing out a brownish rag, possibly a handkerchief, knotted in several places, proceeded to untie one of the knots. The doctor watched him without speaking. Ultimately, from some fastness in the rag a half-sovereign was extracted, and was laid upon the table by Sweeny. The clerk, a well-dressed young gentleman, whose attitude had throughout been one of the extremest aloofness, made an entry in his book with an aggressively business-like air.
“Well, that’s all right,” remarked Dr. Lyden, getting lazily on his legs and looking round for his hat; “it’s a funny thing, but I notice that the defendant brought the exact sum required into court with him.”
“I did! And I’m able to bring more than it, thanks be to God!” said Sweeny fiercely, with all the offended pride of his race. “I have two pounds here this minute—”
“If that’s the way with ye, may be ye’d like us to put a bigger fine on ye!” broke in Mr. Heraty hotly, in instant response to Sweeny’s show of temper.
Dr. Lyden laughed for the first time.
“Mr. Heraty’s getting cross now, in the latter end,” he murmured explanatorily to the general public, while he put on an overcoat, from the pocket of which protruded the Medusa coils of a stethoscope.
Long before the arrival of the mail-car that was to take us away, the loafers and the litigants had alike been swallowed up, apparently by the brown, hungry hillsides; possibly also, some of them, by Mr. Heraty’s tap-room. Again we clambered to our places among the inevitable tourists and their inevitable bicycles, again the laden car lumbered heavily yet swiftly along the bog roads that quivered under its weight, while the water in the black ditches on either side quivered in sympathy. The tourists spoke of the vast loneliness, unconscious of the intricate network of social life that lay all around them, beyond their ken, far beyond their understanding. They spoke authoritatively of Irish affairs; mentioned that the Irish were “a bit ’ot tempered,” but added that “all they wanted was fair play”.
They had probably been in Ireland for a week or fortnight. They had come out of business centres in England, equipped with circular tickets, with feeling hearts, and with the belief that two and two inevitably make four; whereas in Ireland two and two are just as likely to make five, or three, and are still more likely to make nothing at all.
Never will it be given to them to understand the man of whom our friend Sweeny was no more than a type. How can they be expected to realise that a man who is decorous in family and village life, indisputably God-fearing, kind to the poor, and reasonably honest, will enmesh himself in a tissue of sworn lies before his fellows for the sake of half a sovereign and a family feud, and that his fellows will think none the worse of him for it.
These things lie somewhere near the heart of the Irish problem.