they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again and
finished with the deepest curtseys.

My own mother would gladly have done the same on a like occasion, but
she lacked Mrs. Martin's talent for the jig. Mrs. Somerville is sketched
with a free and humorous hand. I quote only one detail, but it shows the
real Irishwoman, more deeply in touch with Ireland's traditional life
than any Gaelic League could bring her. Question arose how to find a
suitable offering for 'an old servant of forty years' standing, whose
fancies were few and her needs none.' "Give her a nice shroud," said
Mrs. Somerville, "there's nothing in the world she'd like so well as
that."

Shakespeare could not have outdone that intuition, and only one of the
larger breed would have been unconventional enough to suggest what the
younger generation, hampered by other feelings than those of West
Carbery, "were too feeble to accept."

These two traits belong to the harmonious and thoroughly Irish grouping
in which such ladies as Mrs. Martin and Mrs. Somerville were central
figures of the whole countryside. That grouping exists no longer, and
this book has to describe the discord which interrupted that harmony.
Martin Ross's elder brother, Robert Martin (famous in his day as the
writer and singer of _Ballyhooly_, and a score of other topical songs),
left his work as a London journalist to help in fighting the first
campaign which brought the word "boycott" into usage.

It was at this work (his sister writes), that Robert knew for the
first time what it was to have every man's hand against him, to
meet the stare of hatred, the jeer and the sidelong curse; to face
endless drives on outside cars with his revolver in his hand; to
plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops and cattle for which a
market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death,
when by accidentally choosing one of two roads he evaded the man
with a gun who had gone out to wait for him.

Robert Martin faced, in a word, the earliest and ugliest phases of that
Irish revolution, which was the Nemesis of the all too easy and too
pleasant ways of yesterday in Ireland. Later, after his death, Martin
Ross herself had to gain some experience of the same trouble. When she
went back with her mother to re-establish the family home from which
they had been fifteen years absent, there was a hostile element in the
parish, and graci