He recovered, but was very shabbily treated by the Government, who only awarded him a miserably small pension, a niggardly act which aroused much dissatisfaction.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Killarney, Doctor Moriarty, protested strongly against the cowardice of the Fenians, who were afraid to face one armed man, and waited until his back was turned before they shot him.

However, as I have indicated, the Fenian movement was very insignificant, and was known in all its aspects to the Government, which dealt pretty roughly with it.

It is a singular fact that in the Fenian councils Killarney should have been selected for the outbreak.

This is a town where nearly all the landed proprietors were Roman Catholics, where there was a Catholic Bishop, a monastery and two convents, while one half-ruined Protestant church sufficed to accommodate the few worshippers who sat under a dreary, inoffensive vicar on a very small salary.  All reasonable folk, moreover, know that Killarney is the town to which, more than any other in Ireland, it is important to attract British tourists.

It was well known that some of the promoters and instigators of the movement betrayed it before its very inception to the Government; and Bishop Moriarty, from his pulpit, in his sermon alluded in no measured language to those criminals who instigated the innocent peasants to play a part in this mock insurrection, and then betrayed them.

He concluded:—­

’It may be a hard saying, but surely hell is not too hot nor eternity too long for the punishment of such villainy.’

Yet the whole of Irish history is disfigured by the poisonous trail of the insidious informer.

I was in Kerry at the time of the Cahirciveen fizzle, in the neighbourhood of Dingle, and it was rumoured that the insurrection was to be general.

That was not my opinion, for I travelled on an open car by myself, with a large quantity of money, and no other weapon than an umbrella.

It was a very different state of affairs in the distress caused by Mr. Gladstone’s legislation, for then I never travelled without a revolver, and occasionally was accompanied by a Winchester rifle.  I used to place my revolver as regularly beside my fork on the dinner-table, either in my own or in anybody else’s house, as I spread my napkin on my knees.

And yet it is strangely difficult to see any other cause than Mr. Gladstone’s Acts for such ill-feeling.

As my sworn evidence, on which I was cross-examined in the Parnell Commission, showed, I had only ten evictions in six years among two thousand tenants.

I should like to ask, in what class of life is there not more than one in twelve hundred that gets into financial troubles in a year?

In the insurance world such a ratio of claims to premiums would make a perfect fortune to the companies.

The tenants were not associated with the Fenian movement at all, the outbreak being solely confined to the townsfolk, which, in Ireland, helped to make it a feeble affair.  I did not know one bona fide farmer that was connected with the movement, and though the arms were mainly smuggled in from America, mighty little hard cash came to the pockets of any but the leaders.