but one
man had had the genius to invent a comic device. This was a very wild
creature, half beggar, half laborer, the last of a rapidly dying class
in Ireland. He had got hold of a wretched nag of whom the knacker had
been defrauded for many years and seated on this in fantastic dress he
cudgelled it unmercifully, amid screams of laughter, for around its neck
was a placard with the words, "Dead Landlordism."

About two o'clock, there was seen making a desperate attempt to
penetrate through this teeming, densely-packed, and noisy multitude, a
stout figure, with a face ugly, irregular, good-humored. He was dressed
in a long and dull-colored and almost shabby ulster. His hat was as
rough as if it had been brushed the wrong way, and he wore a suit of
tweed that was now very old, but that even in its earliest days would
have been scorned by the poorest shopman of the town with any
pretensions to respectability, and the trousers were short and painfully
bagged at the knees. But the divine light of genius shone from the brown
eyes and the ample forehead. The enthusiasm of the multitude now knew no
bounds. There was first a strange stillness, then, when the word seemed
to have passed with a strange and lightning-like rapidity from mouth to
mouth, there burst forth a great cheer, and it was known that Isaac Butt
had come.

But even the Irish leader was destined to play a subordinate part in the
proceedings of this strange day. It was a local speaker that stirred the
hearts of the people to the uttermost, for he told the story of the
eviction of the Widow Cunningham, of the death of her husband, the exile
of her son, the shame of her daughter.

While he was speaking some one cried, "She'll have her own agin," and
then a few of the young fellows disappeared from the platform. In the
course of half-an-hour they returned. They ascended the platform, and
after a while, and another pause, a strange and audible thrill passed
through the multitude; and then there were passed in almost a hoarse
whisper the words, "The Widow Cunningham." And she it was; acting on the
hint of the speaker, she had been taken from the workhouse; and she was
brought back to her old farm again and to the site of her shattered
homestead and broken life. The multitude cheered themselves hoarse;
hundreds rushed to the platform to seize her by the hand; a few women
threw their arms around her neck, and wept and laughed. Finally, the
enthusiasm could not be co