er.

'Certainly it is not so easy when played as you do it here. You deal with
your law-breakers only by the rule of legality: that is to say, you respect
all the regulations of the game towards the men who play false. You have
your cumbrous details, and your lawyers, and judges, and juries, and you
cannot even proclaim a county in a state of siege without a bill in your
blessed Parliament, and a basketful of balderdash about the liberty of the
subject. Is it any wonder rebellion is a regular trade with you, and that
men who don't like work, or business habits, take to it as a livelihood?'

'But have you never heard Curran's saying, young gentleman? "You cannot
bring an indictment against a nation,'" said Miller.

'I'd trouble myself little with indictments,' replied Gorman. 'I'd break
down the confederacy by spies; I'd seize the fellows I knew to be guilty,
and hang them.'

'Without evidence, without trial?'

'Very little of a trial, when I had once satisfied myself of the guilt.'

'Are you so certain that no innocent men might be brought to the scaffold?'
asked the priest mildly.

'No, I am not. I take it, as the world goes, very few of us go through life
without some injustice or another. I'd do my best not to hang the fellows
who didn't deserve it, but I own I'd be much more concerned about the
millions who wanted to live peaceably than the few hundred rapscallions
that were bent on troubling them.'

'I must say, sir,' said the priest, 'I am much more gratified to know that
you are a Lieutenant of Lancers in Austria than a British Minister in
Downing Street.'

'I have little doubt myself,' said the other, laughing, 'that I am more in
my place; but of this I am sure, that if we were as mealy-mouthed with our
Croats and Slovacks as you are with your Fenians, Austria would soon go to
pieces.'

'There is, however, a higher price on that man Donogan's head than Austria
ever offered for a traitor,' said Miller.

'I know how you esteem money here,' said Gorman, laughing. 'When all else
fails you, you fall back upon it.'

'Why did I know nothing of these sentiments, young man, before I asked you
under my roof?' said Miss Betty, in anger.

'You need never to have known them now, aunt, if these gentlemen had not
provoked them, nor indeed are they solely mine. I am only telling you what
you would hear from any intelligent foreigner, even though he chanced to be
a liberal in his own country.'

'Ah, yes,' sighed