He answered that he would go, but he never did, and Mr. Jenkinson subsequently told me that the Land League scented he was going to prove a troublesome informer, so they practically outbid the Government by paying O’Brien a large sum, which was handed to him on the steamer as it was starting for America.

From that time, until I have been recalling the incidents of the explosion for this book, I have never given a thought to the affair and not mentioned it half a dozen times in the twenty years that have elapsed.

CHAPTER XXI

MORE ATROCITIES AND LAND CRIMES

I brought my family back to Kerry in the following summer, and after I had rebuilt Edenburn I lived there until I gave it to my elder son, who has it to this day and resides there in peace.

Matters were very different to that state of idyllic simplicity in the critical times on which I am still dwelling.

One night, while in London, I was at the House of Commons, and the London correspondent of the Freeman, being presumably extremely short of what he would term ‘copy,’ he proceeded to make observations about me after this fashion:—­

’Over here Mr. Hussey is something of a fish out of water.  It would be hazardous to say that if he was to begin his career as an agent again he would eschew the system that has made him famous, but his present frame of mind is unquestionably one of doubt as to whether, after all, the game was worth the candle.’

That young man will go far as a writer of fiction.

I received, among more pleasant welcomes on my return to my native land, the following delightful blast of vituperation from the Irish Citizen, and beg to tender the unknown author my profound thanks for the diversion his ink-slinging afforded me:—­

’Here is something about a man who ought to have been murdered any day since 1879—­indeed we don’t know that he should have been let live even up to that date, and as for his family, their translation to the upper regions by means of a simple charge of dynamite, which nobody of any sense or importance would even think of condemning, has been most unaccountably deferred to the present year.  This man is Mr. S.M.  Hussey, the miasma of whose breath, according to a well-informed murder organ in Dublin, poisons one-half of the kingdom of Kerry.  Let any man read the speeches delivered in Upper Sackville Street, and the articles in United Ireland against Mr. Hussey, and he must ask why the fiend incarnate has not been murdered long since.  The infamy of persistently turning hatred on a man like Mr. Hussey, and then escaping the consequences of having thereby murdered him, has no parallel in any country in the world.  Inciting to murder is practically reduced to a science in Ireland.  That Mr. Hussey has not been murdered years ago is not the fault of the scientist, but the watchfulness of the police.’