rim, which included part of the village of
Ballymartin, and there he passed his days in agricultural pursuits.

2

Mr. Quinn, as has been stated, was a Unionist, and, in spite of his
Catholic name, a Protestant; but he had a poor opinion of his Unionist
neighbours who, so he said, were far more loyal to England than England
quite liked. He hated the English accent ... "finicky bleatin'," he
called it ... and declared, though he really knew better, that all
Englishmen spoke with a Cockney intonation. "A lot of h-droppers," he
called them, adding, "God gave them a decent language, but they haven't
the gumption to talk it!" The Oxford voice, in his opinion, was educated
Cockney, uglier, if possible, than the uneducated brand.

An Englishman, hearing Mr. Quinn talk in this fashion, might pardonably
have imagined that he was listening to a fanatical Nationalist, a
dynamiting Fenian, but if, being a Liberal, he had ventured to advocate
Home Rule for Ireland in Mr. Quinn's presence, he would speedily have
found that he was in error. "Damn the fear!" Mr. Quinn would say when
people charged him with being a Home Ruler. The motive of his Unionism,
however, was neither loyalty to England nor terror of Rome: it was
wholly and unashamedly a matter of commerce. "The English bled us for
centuries," he would say, "an' it's only fair we should bleed them.
We've got our teeth in their skins, an' they're shellin' out their money
gran'! That's what the Union's for--to make them keep on shellin' out
their money. An' instead of tellin' the people to bite deeper an' get
more money out of them, the fools o' Nationalists is tellin' them to
take their teeth out! Never," he would exclaim passionately, "never,
while there's a shillin' in an Englishman's pocket!"

Mr. Quinn, of course, treated every Englishman he met with courtesy, for
he was an Irish gentleman, and he had sometimes been heard to speak
affectionately of some person of English birth. The chief result of this
civility, conjoined with the ferocity of his political statements, was
that his English friends invariably spoke of him as "a typical
Irishman." They looked upon him as so much comic relief to the more
serious things of their own lives, and seemed constantly to expect him
to perform some amusing antic, some innately Celtic act of comic folly.
At such times, Mr. Quinn felt as if he could annihilate an Englishman.

"Ah, well," he would say, restraining himself, "we all know