a strange house where I
knew I would spend a wretched hour for schooling sake. I did not discover
that Hamlet had his self-possession from no schooling but from
indifference and passion conquering sweetness, and that less heroic minds
can but hope it from old age.

XXVIII

I had very little money and one day the toll-taker at the metal bridge
over the Liffey and a gossip of his laughed when I refused the halfpenny
and said "no, I will go round by O'Connell Bridge." When I called for the
first time at a house in Leinster Road several middle-aged women were
playing cards and suggested my taking a hand and gave me a glass of
sherry. The sherry went to my head and I was impoverished for days by the
loss of sixpence. My hostess was Ellen O'Leary, who kept house for her
brother John O'Leary the Fenian, the handsomest old man I had ever seen.
He had been condemned to twenty years penal servitude but had been set
free after five on condition that he did not return to Ireland for fifteen
years. He had said to the government, "I will not return if Germany makes
war on you, but I will return if France does." He and his old sister lived
exactly opposite the Orange leader for whom he had a great respect. His
sister stirred my affection at first for no better reason than her
likeness of face and figure to the matron of my London school, a friendly
person, but when I came to know her I found sister and brother alike were
of Plutarch's people. She told me of her brother's life, how in his youth
as now in his age, he would spend his afternoons searching for rare books
among second-hand book-shops, how the Fenian organizer James Stephens had
found him there and asked for his help. "I do not think you have any
chance of success," he had said, "but if you never ask me to enroll
anybody else I will join, it will be very good for the morals of the
country." She told me how it grew to be a formidable movement, and of the
arrests that followed (I believe that her own sweetheart had somehow
fallen among the wreckage,) of sentences of death pronounced upon false
evidence amid a public panic, and told it all without bitterness. No
fanaticism could thrive amid such gentleness. She never found it hard to
believe that an opponent had as high a motive as her own and needed upon
her difficult road no spur of hate.

Her brother seemed very unlike on a first hearing for he had some violent
oaths, "Good God in Heaven" being one of them; and if he di