th and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images."

II

I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or
fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the
West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single
fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood.
He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and
knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was, however, strangely
beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who
served him, sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though
narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgment of life,
was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected
anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating
him over a horse, or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you
as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help you out of
any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he,
much more liberal-minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life,
and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often
angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could
not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He
would receive me with "I have learned that your friend So and So has been
seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William Redmond. What will not
people do for notoriety?" He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of
Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation
grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where
he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the
wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties. When Parnell was contesting an
election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magistrates
refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not
remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that
assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some
courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation,
except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would
not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at
the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew