man.'

As for those really concerned, people tell me that the three implicated
in the dynamite business are all dead in America, and if the information
is accurate no local person was connected with the explosion, though the
miscreants were, of course, housed in the immediate vicinity.

There was one delicious incident.

The local branch of the Land League at Castleisland refused to pay any
reward to the dynamiters because we had not been killed, and the leading
miscreant actually fired at the treasurer. Eventually the passages to
America of all the triumvirate were paid, and they thought it discreet
to quit the country, cursing their own stingy executive even more deeply
than they blasphemed against the Law and execrated me.

A man from the neighbourhood subsequently wrote to me from London that
he could tell me who perpetrated the Edenburn outrage.

I told him to call on me at the Union Club, of which I was then a
member, and informed him--his name was O'Brien--I would arrange with the
Home Office, in the event of his information being valuable, that he
should get a reward.

He replied that his life was in danger in London from another Fenian.

I went to the Home Office and saw Mr. Jenkinson on the subject. He asked
me to send O'Brien down to him and he would settle matters, adding that
he had reason for believing that the story of threats from another
scoundrel was true.

I saw O'Brien and told him to call on Mr. Jenkinson.

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_, bein